The Complete Dictionary of Symbols is an engaging and accessible guide to more than 2,000 major themes, figures, and symbols that are commonly found in myth, art, and literature. Drawing on classical mythologies, Biblical themes, and traditional symbols from cultures worldwide, this user-friendly, attractively priced reference has comprehensive entries on everything from individual animals, plants, and objects to gods, goddesses, supernatural creatures, heroes, heroines, mythical episodes, prophets, saints, miracles, and myriad other subjects. Whether the topic at hand is Mercury or Merlin, the Egyptian ankh or the humble ant, engaging text reveals the origins and meaning of each symbol. Interspersed with the main entries are short articles on themes of special interest, such as the Sun, Moon, and stars, or common vices. Three hundred illustrations, an intuitive system of cross-referencing, and authoritative research make The Complete Dictionary of Symbols a reliable resource for school, home, or library.

Hiking & Running Guide to Forest Park 10 Map Set

10 very portable, pocket-sized hiking and running maps come in this modern corrugated carboard envelope-style box. An index map of the whole park is included, along with the following 9 maps: - Stone House - City View - Wild-Leif - Heart of the Park - Old Growth - Avenue of Trees - Maple - Big Stump - Hole in the Park The maps are printed on waterproof plastic that can stand the rigors of running and hiking in wet weather or sweat.

Miskatonic U. Graduate Kit: Artifacts from the Worlds Scariest University

Official Rules of Card Games

Paranoia

Virtual Geographic League: Our First Fifty Years (1895-1945)

Earth Book World Atlas

Esselte kartor (Firm)

Character Record Sheets/Ref2 (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition Accessory)

Not Applicable (Na )

Giger (Basic Art)

Not Applicable (Na )

Essentials of C Programming Language

Ernest C. Ackermann

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Douglas Adams

Mostly Harmless

DOUGLAS ADAMS

Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker's Trilogy)

Douglas Adams

SO LONG THANK FISH (Hitchhiker's Trilogy (Paperback))

Douglas Adams

Dilbert Gives You The Business (Ppb)

Scott Adams

Dilbert: Seven Years Of Highly Defective People (P

Scott Adams

Mitsubishi Eclipse & Eagle Talon 1995-2001 All models

Alan Ahlstrand

Vegetarian Asian: The Essential Kitchen (Essential Kitchen Series)

Lynelle Scott Aitken

UML in a Nutshell (Nutshell Handbook)

Sinan Si Alhir

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

David AllenWith first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow,""mind like water," and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance.

Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Doneoffers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action listsall purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organized, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Companyhas dubbed "the personal productivity guru," suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech saber known as the cell phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.)

As whole-life-organizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk, The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket"

That's where the processing and prioritizing begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment; Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabored, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are more organized than most CEOs to start with). Timothy Murphy

Sendmail

Bryan Costales Eric Allman

Dungeon Master's Design Kit (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Accessory)

Harold Johnson Aaron Allston

Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

Isaac Asimov14 new short stories, previously uncollected essays on science fiction and the craft of writing, and the Hugo Award-winning title novella about a writer who gambles everything on a chance at immortality.

Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection

Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov and science fiction are one and the same to millions of readers.He was the field's transcendent genius, its reigning prophet, its genial patriarch, and its most prolific author. But Asimov also wrote fantasy, and invariably of an enduring quality. Magicis his final original collection, containing all of his uncollected fantasy stories that have never before appeared in book form.

In addition, this farewell collection of Asimov's writings also includes his thoughts on the genre of fantasy itself. Here are the fascinating musings of a wide ranging intelligence, discussing everything from Tolkien to Spielberg, from Unicorns to King Arthur, from the difference between maidens and damsels to the speed of Seven League Boots - scientifically calculated at last!

Essentials of Linear Algebra (Essentials)

Staff of Research & Education Assn

Core PHP Programming

Leon AtkinsonCore PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sitesbegins with an introduction to PHP that rapidly moves through the language's constructs. In his introduction, author Leon Atkinson provides a taste of PHP's variable usage, user input, conditional branching, and looping functions in a very concise chapter. A series of topical chapters follow, which explore the language in depth, presenting operators, statements, and concepts. User-defined functions, arrays, and classes are all covered, as is the often tricky topic of disk access.

Part II of the book comprises a topical summary of PHP's built-in functions. This section begins with I/O functions of all types, followed by an analysis of data manipulation and mathematical functions. The chapter on database functions provides a good feel for PHP's extensible nature by discussing programming issues involved with using databases such as dBase, IMAP, LDAP, MySQL, ODBC, Oracle, and Sybase. Throughout all of these chapters, the author is careful to provide digestible, real-world examples for every function.

The final two parts of the book present programming algorithms and basic concepts in application design. Atkinson provides reusable algorithms for sorting and searching, string manipulation, database access, and graphic generation. He discusses how to use PHP with HTML and create applications that are intelligently modular. The accompanying CD-ROM provides the source code for book examples, PHP, Apache, and other programs to get you rolling quickly with this intriguing language. Stephen W. Plain

Reading critically, writing well: A reader and guide

Rise B Axelrod

Computer Algorithms: Introduction to Design and Analysis (Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science)

Sara Baase

Easter Island, Earth Island

Paul G. Bahn John Flenley Paul Bahn

Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers

Mark BaileyIn this entertaining homage to the golden age of the cocktail, illustrator Edward Hemingway and writer Mark Bailey present the best (and thirstiest) American writers, their favorite cocktails, true stories of their saucy escapades, and intoxicating excerpts from their literary works. It’s the perfect blend of classic cocktail recipes, literary history, and tales of the good old days of extravagant Martini lunches and delicious excess.

When Algonquin Round Table legend Robert Benchley was asked if he knew that drinking was a slow death, Benchley took a sip of his cocktail and replied, “So who’s in a hurry?” Hunter S. Thompson took Muhammad Ali’s health tip to eat grapefruit every day; he just added liquor to the mix. Invited to a “come as you are” party, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, arrived in their pajamas ready for their cocktail of choice: a Gin Rickey.

Forty-three classic American writers, forty-three authentic cocktail recipes, forty-three telling anecdotes about the high life, and forty-three samples of the best writing in literature –Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writersdelivers straight-up fun.

Shivakumar Chonnad Needamangalam BalachanderThis book addresses "front end" questions and issues encountered in using the Verilog HDL, during all the stages of Hardware Design, Synthesis and Verification. The issues discussed in the book are typically encountered in both ASIC design projects as well as in Soft IP designs. These issues are addressed in a simple Q&A format. Since each issue is independently dealt with and explained in detail, this book acts as an important source of reference for the Verilog users. Each of the FAQs will be illustrated with figures and tables as required. The latest Verilog-2001 and SystemVerilog have also been referred to in this book.

With the increasing complexity of ASICs being designed these days, the decisions that one makes in any of the stages of Design, Synthesis or Verification has profound effects on these three stages. This book presents the intricacies of these inter-dependent issues in the context of the Verilog HDL.

Nick BantockFew books are more romantic than this trilogy, nor more surreal. Griffin Moss is a rather doleful, lonesome, gaunt, and haunted postcard designer in London. Sabine Strohem is an illustrator of stamps living on an island in the South Pacific. One day Griffin gets an extraordinary letter from Sabine revealing that she knows all kinds of things about his life and worksomehow, she can share his soul from afar. They start exchanging love letters, yet it remains an open question whether Griffin and Sabine are two hearts that mystically beat as one, or simply illusory. "You're a figment of my imagination," Griffin accuses Sabine. "You cannot turn me into a phantom because you are frightened," Sabine replies. Phantom or soul mate, Sabine is pursued across the globe by Griffin in an increasingly impassioned fashion, and the mysteries deepen.

The legendarily popular trilogy of books containing the Griffin-Sabine correspondence literally contains the correspondence: postcards, front and back, and letters in envelopes pasted into the book, which the reader must open and reada temptation few can resist. Nick Bantock's story was way ahead of the computer game Myst, with which it shares a moody allure. Bantock designed hundreds of book covers (for Philip Roth, John Updike, and others) before he fled London for a lovely island off the west coast of Canada with his rather Sabine-like artist wife and became improbably famous by dreaming up this trilogy. His artwork is gorgeous, and countless romances have been intensified by exposure to that of Griffin and Sabine. Tim Appelo

Familiar quotations: A collection of passages, phrases, and proverbs traced to their sources in ancient and modern literature

John Bartlett

The Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

Kent BeckKent Beck's eXtreme Programming eXplainedprovides an intriguing high-level overview of the author's Extreme Programming (XP) software development methodology. Written for IS managers, project leaders, or programmers, this guide provides a glimpse at the principles behind XP and its potential advantages for small- to mid-size software development teams.

The book intends to describe what XP is, its guiding principles, and how it works. Simply written, the book avoids case studies and concrete details in demonstrating the efficacy of XP. Instead, it demonstrates how XP relies on simplicity, unit testing, programming in pairs, communal ownership of code, and customer input on software to motivate code improvement during the development process. As the author notes, these principles are not new, but when they're combined their synergy fosters a new and arguably better way to build and maintain software. Throughout the book, the author presents and explains these principles, such as "rapid feedback" and "play to win," which form the basis of XP.

Generally speaking, XP changes the way programmers work. The book is good at delineating new roles for programmers and managers who Beck calls "coaches." The most striking characteristic of XP is that programmers work in pairs, and that testing is an intrinsic part of the coding process. In a later section, the author even shows where XP works and where it doesn't and offers suggestions for migrating teams and organizations over to the XP process.

In the afterword, the author recounts the experiences that led him to develop and refine XP, an insightful section that should inspire any organization to adopt XP. This book serves as a useful introduction to the philosophy and practice of XP for the manager or programmer who wants a potentially better way to build software. Richard Dragan

The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre

H.P. Lovecraft Robert BlochLovecraft is "the American writer of the twentieth century most frequently compared with Poe, in the quality of his art ... [and] its thematic preoccupations (the obsessive depiction of psychic disintegration in the face of cosmic horror)," writes Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books. Del Rey has reprinted Lovecraft's stories in three handsome paperbacks. This first volume collects 16 classic tales, including "The Rats in the Walls,""The Call of Cthulhu,""The Dunwich Horror," and "The Colour Out of Space." Introduction by Robert Bloch. Wraparound cover art by Michael Whelan.

101 Uses for a Dead Cat

SIMON BOND

Bookshelves and Cabinets

Sunset Books

Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel

Joshua Piven David BorgenichtBe very, very afraid. When you step through your door for an innocent excursion, grave danger awaits. You might be mugged; tied up; attacked by scorpions, piranhas, or tarantulas; trapped in a falling plane or elevator, a runaway train, a car on a cliff, a sandstorm, a riptide, or a riot. But now it's safe to take that vacation anyway. Just pack The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel, and you'll know what to do when you find yourself, say, leaping between rooftops: "Because you will not be moving fast, it is safe to roll head over heels, unlike jumping from a moving vehicle." Now you'll also know what notto do: never pick up a tarantula, as the spines on their abdomens are like little harpoons, and don't yank the reins of a runaway camel ("Pulling on the nose reins can tear the camel's noseor break the reins"). You may have the sense, if a leech invades your air passage, to gargle with a 50 percent solution of 80-proof alcoholbut without this book, would you remember not to inhale?

In short, this is the most delightfully terrifying, all-true, laugh-out-loud hilarious book since the original Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, which covers such horrors as alligators and quicksand. Don't leave home without it! Tim Appelo

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook

Joshua Piven David BorgenichtHow to Wrestle Free from an Alligator: 4. If its jaws are closed on something you want to remove (for example, a limb), tap or punch it on the snout.

Though it's being marketed as a humorous titleafter all, it's unlikely you'll be called upon to land a plane, jump from a motorcycle to a moving car, or win a swordfightthe information contained in The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbookis all quite sound. Authors Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht consulted numerous experts in their fields (they're cited at the end of the book) to discover how to survive various and sundry awful events. Parachute doesn't open? Your best bet for survival is to hook your arms through the straps of a fellow jumper's chuteand even then you're likely to dislocate both shoulders and break both legs. Car sinking in water? Open the window immediately to equalize pressure, then open the car door and swim to the surface. Buried in an avalanche? Spit on the snowit will tell you which direction is really up. Then dig as fast as you can.

Each survival skill is explained in simple steps with helpful illustrations. Most stress the need to be preparedboth mentally and physically. For example, to escape from quicksand, you will need to lay a pole on the surface of the quicksand, flop on your back atop the pole, and pull your legs out one by one. No pole? No luck. "When walking in quicksand country, carry a stout poleit will help you get out should you need to."

Hopefully you'll never need to know how to build a fire without matches, perform a tracheotomy, or treat a bullet wound. But in the words of survival evasion resistance escape instructor "Mountain" Mel Deweese, "You never know."Sunny Delaney

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

Jorge Luis BorgesIf Jorge Luis Borges had been a computer scientist, he probably would have invented hypertext and the World Wide Web.

Instead, being a librarian and one of the world's most widely read people, he became the leading practitioner of a densely layered imaginistic writing style that has been imitated throughout this century, but has no peer (although Umberto Eco sometimes comes close, especially in Name of the Rose).

Borges's stories are redolent with an intelligence, wealth of invention, and a tight, almost mathematically formal style that challenge with mysteries and paradoxes revealed only slowly after several readings. Highly recommended to anyone who wants their imagination and intellect to be aswarm with philosophical plots, compelling conundrums, and a wealth of real and imagined literary references derived from an infinitely imaginary library.

A Superior Person's Second Book of Weird

PETER BOWLER

The Martian Chronicles

RAY BRADBURYFrom "Rocket Summer" to "The Million-Year Picnic," Ray Bradbury's stories of the colonization of Mars form an eerie mesh of past and future. Written in the 1940s, the chronicles drip with nostalgic atmosphereshady porches with tinkling pitchers of lemonade, grandfather clocks, chintz-covered sofas. But longing for this comfortable past proves dangerous in every way to Bradbury's charactersthe golden-eyed Martians as well as the humans.Starting in the far-flung future of 1999, expedition after expedition leaves Earth to investigate Mars. The Martians guard their mysteries well, but they are decimated by the diseases that arrive with the rockets. Colonists appear, most with ideas no more lofty than starting a hot-dog stand, and with no respect for the culture they've displaced.

Bradbury's quiet exploration of a future that looks so much like the past is sprinkled with lighter material. In "The Silent Towns," the last man on Mars hears the phone ring and ends up on a comical blind date. But in most of these stories, Bradbury holds up a mirror to humanity that reflects a shameful treatment of "the other," yielding, time after time, a harvest of loneliness and isolation. Yet the collection ends with hope for renewal, as a colonist family turns away from the demise of the Earth towards a new future on Mars. Bradbury is a master fantasist and The Martian Chroniclesare an unforgettable work of art. Blaise Selby

Vampire: The Masquerade

Lisa Stevens Stewart Wieck Tim Bradstreet

Mathematical Introduction to Linear Programming and Game Theory (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics)

Frederick P. BrooksTheclassic book on the human elements of software engineering. Software tools and development environments may have changed in the 21 years since the first edition of this book, but the peculiarly nonlinear economies of scale in collaborative work and the nature of individuals and groups has not changed an epsilon. If you write code or depend upon those who do, get this book as soon as possible  from Amazon.com Books, your library, or anyone else. You (and/or your colleagues) will be forever grateful. Very Highest Recommendation.

Professional Java Server Programming J2EE Edition

Subrahmanyam Allamaraju Andrew Longshaw Daniel O'Connor Gordon Van Huizen Jason Diamond John Griffin Mac Holden Marcus Daley Mark Wilcox Richard BrowettSun's Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), provides all of the APIs that are needed to build world-class enterprise applications. Written by over a dozen experts, this new edition of Professional Java Server Programmingprovides a truly massive and authoritative guide to the latest standards and APIs that are available in J2EE. This title is a must-have for anyone who's serious about enterprise development in Java.

Weighing in at over 1,400 pages, Professional Java Server Programmingprovides a wide-reaching resource of all of the APIs that are required for J2EE development that centers on servlets and JSPs for creating UIs and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), XML, and JDBC for getting to data on the server. Besides being a practical guide to how to combine these standards (with plenty of useful examples of these APIs in action), it also delivers a healthy dose of the design philosophy that's recommended by Sun for building scalable and robust enterprise Web applications.

Throughout, this text does a good job of merging theory with practice. Almost every chapter has a useful working example that shows how APIs work, with sample code for such Web applications as an e-commerce shopping cart, tech support pages, and a front end for a manufacturing database. The core of this volume is its treatment of servlets and JSPs for building Web-based front ends in Java. This new edition also highlights EJBs in excellent detail, with a thorough tour of designing, programming, and deploying EJBs effectively. (There's also notable coverage of the emerging EJB 2.0 standard, which adds several important features, like a query language for more powerful database access.)

The practical focus here is reflected also in chapters that are devoted to debugging, testing, and deploying J2EE applicationscritical issues for any aspiring enterprise developer. While no single book can make you an expert, this one can get you started with a superb tour of the APIs and technologies that you'll need to tackle large-scale development in Java. Richard Dragan

The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum

E. A. Wallis Budge

Grokking the GIMP

Carey BunksThe excitement described by Carey Bunks when he first beheld the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) in 1996 is palpable when you hold Bunks's new book in your hands. The phantasmagoric image on the cover of Grokking the GIMP: Advanced Techniques for Working with Digital Imagesmelds a photograph of the moon's surface from a high orbit with an apparent solar eclipse by the earth. A penguin floats discretely in a hot air balloon between sun-earth and moon. Is the sun-moon-earth image a bit of the penguin's imagination? Is it a piece of GIMP artist/developer Tuomas Kuosmanen's imagination? Maybe it is really a credit to the visionaries at New Riders who have produced an art book to suit the computer how-to market.

"Grokking" is a Robert Heinlein-ism for "appreciating," and docent Bunks takes us through the museum of computer art and method as he demonstrates the features of the freely redistributable package. The contents follow that path set down by many other how-to tech book authors: tutorial, a taste of image theory, working with the independent features of GIMP (layers, selections, masks, and colorspaces) before advancing to compositing and rendering, and ending with a short review of Web-based applications of image manipulation.

The book's strengths are Bunks's obvious passion for his subject, his mature didactic style, and the wonderfully spacious design and breathtaking color-on-every-page strategy that allows him to beautifully frame GIMP features at their best. The most notable of his many case studies is the "Panorama" project that glues a series of laterally overlapping narrow-view photographs of an architecturally interesting room into a single, stunning, wide-angle panorama of the whole. Bunks documents each step in the transformation and describes the required geometrical, hue, and brightness adjustments needed to warp and blend them together.

Look again at the cover, but not literally. Ignore the unphysical details. Rather, imagine the mind's capacity for juxtaposition and GIMP's power for actualizing this visual synthesis. In form and content, Bunks and New Riders have shown that the possibilities for the tech book are far broader than previously imagined. This is an eye-opening contribution, indeed. Peter Leopold

FAIL SAFE

EUGENE BURDICK

RTF Pocket Guide

Sean M. Burke

Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamyia notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."

Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one bookthe hallucinogenic ravings of a heroin addictso seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunchin a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.

Burroughs's literary experimentthe much-touted "cut-up" techniquemirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humorslapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunchabout? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunchis its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself.

The Western Lands

William S. Burroughs

Txt Tlk

Terry BurrowsRemember passing notes in school? Now you can type just about any secret message you can think of into your cell phone and beam it silently and electronically across the room, or around the world. TXT TLK: Hw2 Tlk W/o Bng Hrdis your secret decoder ring, a passbook full of cute, romantic, and strange sentiments translated from an increasingly common text-messaging shorthand. You may think you're hip for knowing what "LYLAS" means ("love you like a sister"), but what would you do if someone sent you a message saying "GAL?" Or how about the cryptic symbol that looks like this:

@->->->-

Well, in response to "GAL," which means "get a life," you might respond with a snappy "ThtsSoLm" ("that's so lame"). But if someone sends you the symbol, count yourself lucky, because it represents a flower. Then again, if it's someone you don't know, you could answer "WGYMN?" ("Who gave you my number?")

All this sounds a bit like an elaborate way to avoid making a phone call, or even (gasp!) meeting someone face-to-face. And you've got to have a state-of-the-art cell phone to be able to send text messages at all. But TXT TLK, in an obvious appeal to wired youth, says these shorthand messages are most useful when you want to talk but don't want anyone to hear youin a classroom, maybe? Therese Littleton

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy : and Other Stories

Tim BurtonThis unassuming hardcover in black buckram with a dark lavender title plate is the door into a world of twisted pleasures. Filmmaker Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas) tells 23 winsomely macabre stories about boys and girls who don't fit in. Their bodies are misshapen, their habits are odd, and their parents are appalled by them. But they do try hard to be human, like poor unwanted Mummy Boy, who's "a bundle of gauze": he goes for a walk in the park with his mummy dog. Some kids are having "a birthday party for a Mexican girl." They think Mummy Boy is a piñata: "They took a baseball bat and whacked open his head. Mummy Boy fell to the ground; he finally was dead. Inside of his head were no candy or prizes, just a few stray beetles of various sizes." For all its simple humor, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Storiesis a peculiarly disturbing book about the violence that children suffer. It is illustrated in pen and ink, watercolor, and crayon. The themes and imagery are at a young-adult to adult level.

King Solomon's Mines (Oxford World's Classics)

H. Rider Haggard Dennis Butts

Dhammapada (Shambhala Pocket Classics)

THOMAS BYROM

Spidering Hacks

Kevin Hemenway Tara Calishain

Learning GNU Emacs (A Nutshell handbook)

Bill Rosenblatt Debra Cameron

TAO OF PHYSICS-3 ED.

FRITJOF CAPRA

Robotech Art I

Kay Reynolds Ardith Carlton

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Illustrated Junior Library)

Lewis CarrollYes, this is the Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice in Wonderland, and these two works show the same quirky humor. Here you see Carroll the mathematician at his playful best. Don't let the title of the first work mislead youthis isn't about modern symbolic logic but about ways of expressing classical logic with symbols. It's loaded with amusing problems to delight any mathematical puzzler. In the second work he turns logic into a game played with diagrams and colored counters, giving you hundreds of challenging and witty syllogisms to solve. Great mind-stretching fun.

Take the IQ Challenge

Carter

The Times Book Of Iq Tests: Book 5 (Times Book of IQ Tests)

Kenneth A. Russell Philip Carter

Programming Jakarta Struts

Chuck CavanessIf you've adopted Java as your organizational language, you're probably using, or planning to use, some sort of multitier design to maximize maintainability while making your data store accessible to as many applications as possible. The Jakarta engine ranks as the interface server of choice in that environment, and the Jakarta Struts Framework 1.1 makes it far easier to implement multitier information systems. Programming Jakarta Strutsis the best how-to documentation aroundin print or on the Interneton the subject of using Struts to their greatest potential. Chuck Cavaness's book is comprehensive, detailed, critical of its subject where appropriate, and generally invaluable to anyone implementing the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern in Java with the assistance of Struts.

Thankfully, Cavaness opens with an overview of the MVC pattern with a focus on how you're meant to implement it under Struts. For anyone thinking that implementing MVC sounds like more trouble than it's worth, this clarifies why such design usually pays off in the long run. After that, it's into the particulars, which include code listings (lots of them, delightfully commented) and crystal-clear block diagrams that show the flow of messages among objects. There are also many database schema charts that show how the authors structure data in the storefront and shopping cart application that spans the whole of this volume. David Wall

Topics covered:The Jakarta Struts Framework 1.1 and how to use it to implement the Model-View-Controller (MVC) software design pattern. All the important features of Struts 1.1 get attention, including exception handling, the validation framework, internationalization, logging, and templating with the Tiles framework.

Understanding the Linux Kernel (2nd Edition)

Daniel P. Bovet Marco Cesati

Network Security with OpenSSL

John Viega Matt Messier Pravir Chandra

The Wisdom of the Vedas (Theosophical Heritage Classics)

Jagadish Chandra Chatterji

9-11

Noam Chomsky

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

Noam Chomsky

And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie

Murder on the Orient Express

Agatha Christie

Build Your Own Z80 Computer

Steve Ciarcia

Starter's Guide to Verilog 2001

Michael D. Ciletti

Climbing Rock and Ice: Learning the Vertical Dance

Jerry Cinnamon

2061: Odyssey Three

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Classic Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories (Wordsworth Collection)

Collings

The Complete Bachelor

D. Appleton and Company

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition

James Duncan Davidson Inc. Apple Computer

Absinthe: History in a Bottle

Barnaby, III ConradOne hundred forty-four proof, notoriously addictive, and the drug of choice for nineteenth-century poets, absinthe is gaining bootleg popularity after almost ?a century of being banned. Due to popular demand, Absinthe: History in a Bottle is back in paperback with a handsome new cover. Like the author's bestselling The Martini and The Cigar,it is a potent brew of wild nights and social history, fact and trivia, gorgeous art and beautiful artifacts. As intoxicating as its subject, Absinthemakes a memorable gift for anyone who knows how to celebrate vice.

Alessandro Rubini Jonathan CorbetUpdated to cover version 2.4.x of the Linux kernel, the second edition of Linux Device Driversremains the best general-purpose, paper-bound guide for programmers wishing to make hardware devices work under the world's most popular open-source operating system. The authors take care to show how to write drivers that are portablethat is, that compile and run under all popular Linux platforms. That, along with the fact that they're careful to explain and illustrate concepts, makes this book very well suited to any programmer familiar with C but not with the hardware-software interface. It's worth noting that the emphasis in the title is on "device drivers" as much as "Linux." This book will make sense to you if you've never written a driver for any platform before. It helps if you have some Linux or Unix background, but even that is secondary as a prerequisite to C skill.

For a programming textand one concerned with low-level instructions and data structures, at thatthis book is remarkably rich in prose. You'll typically want to read this book straight through, more or less skipping the code samples, before sketching out your plan for the driver you need to write. Then, go back and pay closer attention to the sections on specific details you need to implement, like custom task queues. For coding-time details about specific system calls and programming techniques, count on the index to point you to the right passages. David Wall

Topics covered:Techniques for writing hardware device drivers that run under Linux kernels 2.0.x through 2.2.x. Sections show how to manage memory, time, interrupts, ports, and other details of the hardware-software interface.

Microsoft Press Microsoft CorporationThis package is remarkable, not just for being a huge resource kit, but because it includes a full working copy of the Windows 98 Beta 3 operating system (OS). This marks the first time that Microsoft has ever bundled a beta OS with a book. If you're not already part of the Windows 98 beta test, it's probably your only shot at testing Windows 98 and its supporting applications and tools before it is released. The bundle includes a free technical support program that covers the important areas of boot failure, data loss, and critical application failure (this program is available to U.S. and Canadian customers only).

Microsoft is primarily targeting the Microsoft Windows 98 Resource Kit, Beta Release at administrators who want to evaluate Windows 98 in a corporate environment. But the beta has remarkably few rough edges and anyone interested in Windows 98 should be able to install it successfully.

The CD-ROM contains the full beta version of Windows 98 Beta 3, including Internet Explorer 4.0, the Outlook Express mail client, FrontPage Express, the Microsoft Personal Web Server, and a clutch of administration tools. The installation features are complete and all major features of the operating system (including network protocols and device drivers) appear to be in place. More importantly, bugs seem to be at a minimum and the code is clearly in good shape for testing by real end users. The beta can be installed on a newly formatted drive or as an upgrade over an existing Windows 95 installation.

The administration tools include the Windows 98 System Policy Editor, Registry tools, installation scripting, and the Power Toys. For end users, the disk also contains an online User's Guide and three Discover Windows 98 automated tours. The beta will not operate beyond December 31, 1998, at which point Windows 98 will presumably have shipped.

The printed volume is primarily intended to help system administrators support Windows. Almost 1,800 pages in bulk, it covers deployment and installation, system configuration, networking, Internet communications, and the Windows 98 architecture in even more detail than past resource kits.

Schwa: World Operations Manual

The Schwa Corporation

Generation X : Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Douglas Coupland

Girlfriend in a Coma

Douglas CouplandIn this latest novel from the poet laureate of Gen Xwho is himself now a dangerously mature 36boy does indeed meet girl. The year is 1979, and the lovers get right down to business in a very Couplandian bit of plein airintercourse: "Karen and I deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope, atop crystal snow shards beneath penlight stars. It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moonlung-burning; mentholated and pure; hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo." Are we in for an archetypal '80s romance, played out against a pop-cultural backdrop? Nope. Only hours after losing her virginity, Karen loses consciousness as wellfor almost two decades. The narrator and his circle soldier on, making the slow progression from debauched Vancouver youths to semiresponsible adults. Several end up working on a television series that bears a suspicious resemblance to The X-Files(surely a self-referential wink on the author's part). And then ... Karen wakes up. Her astonishmentwhich suggests a 20th-century, substance-abusing Rip Van Winkledominates the second half of the novel, and gives Coupland free reign to muse about time, identity, and the meaning (if any) of the impending millennium. Alas, he also slaps a concluding apocalypse onto the novel. As sleeping sickness overwhelms the populace, the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a universal yawnwhich doesn't, fortunately, outweigh the sweetness, oddity, and ironic smarts of everything that has preceded it.

The Gum Thief: A Novel

Douglas CouplandThe first and only story of love and looming apocalypse set in the aisles of an office supply superstore.

In Douglas Coupland’s ingenious new novel—sort of a Clerksmeets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged “aisles associate” at Staples, condemned to restocking reams of 20-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life. And Roger’s co-worker Bethany, in her early twenties and at the end of her Goth phase, who is looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in aisle 6.

One day, Bethany discovers Roger’s notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that this old guy she’s never considered as quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her: and, spookily, he is getting her right.

These two retail workers then strike up an extraordinary epistolary relationship. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger’s work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond, a Cheever-era novella gone horribly, horribly wrong. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thiefreveals the comedy, loneliness, and strange comforts of contemporary life.

Coupland electrifies us on every page of this witty, wise, and unforgettable novel. Love, death and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them …and even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can slowly rebuild you.

JPod: A Novel

Douglas CouplandAlready dubbed Microserfs 2.0by some punditsa winking allusion to Douglas Coupland's previous novel Microserfs, which similarly chronicled pop-culture-damaged twentysomething misfits flailing, foundering, and occasionally succeeding in the high-tech sectorJPodis, like all of Coupland's novels, a byproduct of its era and yet strangely detached from it. Only this time with a bold and very crafty narrative device: Douglas Coupland, novelist, is a character in Douglas Coupland's novel. Which, when you think about it, makes sense since the type of people Coupland depicts are precisely the type of people who consume Coupland novels. As the once-great comedian Dennis Miller might holler, "Stop him before he sub-references again!" Readers familiar with Coupland's oeuvre know what to expect with the characterizations here. They also know that Coupland on a roll is both savagely observant and laugh-out-loud funny: "Bree was showing someone photos of her recent holiday visiting Korean animation sweathshops. She was bummed because she couldn't get into North Korea: too much legal juju. [She said] 'I just wanted to know what it's like to be in a society with no technology except for three dial telephones and a TV camera they won from Fidel Castro in a game of rock paper scissors.'" Much of the book is like that, built on granular and meandering exchanges between characters about . . . stuff. While JPod's flow is hobbled by some preposterous twists and character traits and by random words, phrases, and numbers splattered gratuitously across successive pages in oversized typeface, it's hard to imagine Coupland fans walking away disappointed. Kim Hughes

LIFE AFTER GOD : LIFE AFTER GOD

Douglas Coupland

Microserfs

Douglas CouplandMicroserfsis not about Microsoftitit's about programmers who are searching for lives. A hilarious but frighteningly real look at geek life in the '90's, Coupland's book manifests a peculiar sense of how technology affects the human race and how it will continue to affect all of us. Microserfsis the hilarious journal of Dan, an ex-Microsoft programmer who, with his coder comrades, is on a quest to find purpose in life. This isn't just fodder for techies. The thoughts and fears of the not-so-stereotypical characters are easy for any of us to relate to, and their witty conversations and quirky view of the world make this a surprisingly thought-provoking book.

" ... just think about the way high-tech cultures purposefully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s," muses one programmer. "I mean, all those Nerf toys and free beverages! And the way tech firms won't even call work 'the office,' but instead, 'the campus.' It's sick and evil."

Isaac Asimov's Robot City, Book 4: Prodigy

Arthur Byron Cover

Programming with Qt (2nd Edition)

Matthias Kalle DalheimerFor anyone programming Qt, Programming with Qt, Second Editionprovides an excellent one-volume tutorial and reference to virtually all the features and APIs available in the powerful Qt C++ GUI cross-platform library. Whether you are just starting out with Qt, or want to catch up on new and advanced features, this title offers an invaluable resource for readers.

The no-nonsense approach and right-on-target examples help distinguish this text. The book begins by making a case for cross-platform development. (Qt shows that Java is not the only game in town in this regard.) A later section on good GUI design and some hints for better portability help make this title a good way to learn GUI programming from the ground up.

Short, clear examples show off the basics, starting with a "Hello World" application. Emphasis is on using the Qt APIs effectively rather than getting bogged down in C++ syntax. Since GUI programming is a strength, the author covers the built-in "widgets" available in Qt in excellent detail, including fancier controls like tables and new dial components. The Qt library is also a general-purpose application framework, and there's coverage here for file APIs, collections, and late-breaking support for XML processing.

The basics are augmented here with short sections showing particular APIs at work. Most readers will likely find the material on Qt's SQL Module for database programming indispensable. A section on custom controls is also a standout and more advanced readers will learn how to using OpenGL calls in Qt as well as how to interoperate with Perl modules.

The book closes with sections that will benefit the less experienced Qt developer, including how to use Visual C++ 6 to let you build Qt executables, and how to take advantage of Qt's Designer tool to simplify designing forms and components visually.

Right up to date with the latest on Qt from top to bottom, this text really shines with its notably concise and authoritative style that readers will have come to expect from O'Reilly titles. For anyone tackling Qt development, the second edition of Programming Qtis sure to be a necessary addition to your programming bookshelf. Richard Dragan

Programming with Qt (2nd Edition)

Matthias Kalle DalheimerFor anyone programming Qt, Programming with Qt, Second Editionprovides an excellent one-volume tutorial and reference to virtually all the features and APIs available in the powerful Qt C++ GUI cross-platform library. Whether you are just starting out with Qt, or want to catch up on new and advanced features, this title offers an invaluable resource for readers.

The no-nonsense approach and right-on-target examples help distinguish this text. The book begins by making a case for cross-platform development. (Qt shows that Java is not the only game in town in this regard.) A later section on good GUI design and some hints for better portability help make this title a good way to learn GUI programming from the ground up.

Short, clear examples show off the basics, starting with a "Hello World" application. Emphasis is on using the Qt APIs effectively rather than getting bogged down in C++ syntax. Since GUI programming is a strength, the author covers the built-in "widgets" available in Qt in excellent detail, including fancier controls like tables and new dial components. The Qt library is also a general-purpose application framework, and there's coverage here for file APIs, collections, and late-breaking support for XML processing.

The basics are augmented here with short sections showing particular APIs at work. Most readers will likely find the material on Qt's SQL Module for database programming indispensable. A section on custom controls is also a standout and more advanced readers will learn how to using OpenGL calls in Qt as well as how to interoperate with Perl modules.

The book closes with sections that will benefit the less experienced Qt developer, including how to use Visual C++ 6 to let you build Qt executables, and how to take advantage of Qt's Designer tool to simplify designing forms and components visually.

Right up to date with the latest on Qt from top to bottom, this text really shines with its notably concise and authoritative style that readers will have come to expect from O'Reilly titles. For anyone tackling Qt development, the second edition of Programming Qtis sure to be a necessary addition to your programming bookshelf. Richard Dragan

The Liar Paradox and the Towers of Hanoi: The Ten Greatest Math Puzzles of All Time

Marcel Danesi

House of Leaves : A novel

Mark Z. Danielewski

Only Revolutions: A Novel

Mark Z. DanielewskiMark Danielewski's first novel House of Leavesis a cult-favoriteexperimental horror fiction in a gorgeous (and newly remastered) full-color package. His new book Only Revolutionstakes the experiment 10 steps further in a story about teenage lovers Hailey and Sam: the book is printed on two sidesone side tells the story from Hailey's point of view, flip it over and you get Sam's side (literally). We caught a glimpse inside the mind-bending new noveltake a look for yourself below.

Inside Only Revolutions

Hailey's Story

Covers

Sam's Story

Frightful Fairytales

Dame Darcy

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists: A Novel

Gideon DefoeNot since Moby-Dick...No, not since Treasure Island...Actually, not since Jonah and the Whale has there been a sea saga to rival The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, featuring the greatest sea-faring hero of all time, the immortal Pirate Captain, who, although he lives for months at a time at sea, somehow manages to keep his beard silky and in good condition.

Worried that his pirates are growing bored with a life of winking at pretty native ladies and trying to stick enough jellyfish together to make a bouncy castle, the Pirate Captain decides it's high time to spearhead an adventure.

While searching for some major pirate booty, he mistakenly attacks the young Charles Darwin's Beagle and then leads his ragtag crew from the exotic Galapagos Islands to the fog-filled streets of Victorian London. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, radioactive elephants, and the Holy Ghost himself. And that's not even the half of it.

How to Dry Foods

Deanna DelongA kitchen favorite for more than two decades-revised and expanded. Includes more than 100 irresistible recipes.

When you dry food, you're saving everything: energy, nutrients, money, and, best of all, taste. This step-by-step guide to drying all kinds of fruits, vegetables, and nuts is also the most comprehensive reference available for methods of drying and home dehydrating equipment. The only book needed to master this age-old culinary tradition, How to Dry Foodsincludes:

- Step-by-step instructions on how to dry a wide variety of foods

- Updated information about equipment and drying techniques

- More than 100 delicious recipes, from main courses to desserts and more

- Helpful charts and tables for at-a-glance reference

- Food safety tips

- Clever crafts that are made from dried foods

Pop-up Spooky Castle

Nick Denchfield

The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul

Douglas R. Hofstadter Daniel C. Dennett Daniel C. DennettEver wondered who you are? Who you reallyare? This collection of writings and reflections by some of today's most notable thinkers is designed to enliven this most central, and most baffling, question in the philosophy of mind. In some ways, the questions posed and bantered about in this book are at the heart of all philosophical reasoning. They are the ultimate questions about the self. The Mind's Icontains an astonishing variety of approaches to answering the question, "Who am I?" Between the covers of this book one encounters the literary erudition of Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges alongside the analytic rigor of John Searle. There are sophisticated metaphorical pieces (such as "The Princess Ineffabelle" by Polish philosopher and writer Stanislaw Lem), intriguing dialogues (like Raymond Smullyan's "Is God a Taoist?"), and serious but engaging philosophical essays from a host of thinkers (see Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?").

Editors Hofstadter and Dennettleading lights in the study of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mindfollow each selection with a short reflection designed to elaborate on their main themes. The Mind's Iadmirably broadens their fields to a more general audience. The book's essays are grouped into six categories, each successively raising the philosophical stakes by introducing new levels of complexity. Ultimately, one confronts some of the thorniest questions in modern philosophy here, such as the nature of free will, our place in the metaphysical world, and the possibility of genuine artificial intelligence. The book closes with a playful and perplexing piece by Robert Nozick, an adequate summation to The Mind's I. He writes, "Perhaps God has not decided yet whether he has created, in this world, a fictional world or a real one.... Which decision do you hope for?"Eric de Place

Dictionary of Synonyms & Antonyms

Joseph Devlin

The planiverse: Computer contact with a two-dimensional world

A. K Dewdney

The Man in the High Castle

PHILIP K. DICK

The Minority Report (P. K. Dick)

PHILIP K. DICK

Radio Free Albemuth

PHILIP K. DICK

A Scanner Darkly (Vintage)

Philip K. DickMind- and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darklycuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died from drug abuse. Nevertheless, it's blackly farcical, full of comic-surreal conversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens. (It takes 11,000 years of this to reach the time when as a boy he discovered masturbation.) The antihero Bob Arctor is forced by his double life into warring double personalities: as futuristic narcotics agent "Fred," face blurred by a high-tech scrambler, he must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. His disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off the addict's downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kind of redemptionthere are more wheels within wheels than we suspected, and his life is not entirely wasted. David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford: And Other Classic Stories (Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick)

Philip K. Dick

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

Philip K. Dick

Ubik

PHILIP K. DICKNobody but Philip K. Dick could so successfully combine SF comedy with the unease of reality gone wrong, shifting underfoot like quicksand. Besides grisly ideas like funeral parlors where you swap gossip for the advice of the frozen dead, Ubik(1969) offers such deadpan farce as a moneyless character's attack on the robot apartment door that demands a five-cent toll:

"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."

Chip works for Glen Runciter's anti-psi security agency, which hires out its talents to block telepathic snooping and paranormal dirty tricks. When its special team tackles a big job on the Moon, something goes terribly wrong. Runciter is killed, it seemsbut messages from him now appear on toilet walls, traffic tickets, or product labels. Meanwhile, fragments of reality are timeslipping into past versions: Joe Chip's beloved stereo system reverts to a hand-cranked 78 player with bamboo needles. Why does Runciter's face appear on U.S. coins? Why the repeated ads for a hard-to-find universal panacea called Ubik ("safe when taken as directed")?

The true, chilling state of affairs slowly becomes clear, though the villain isn't who Joe Chip thinks. And this is Dick country, where final truths are never quite final andwith the help of Ubikthe reality/illusion balance can still be tilted the other way. David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

We Can Build You

PHILIP K. DICK

House That Crack Built

Clark Taylor Jan Thompson Dicks

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Cory Doctorow

Eastern Standard Tribe

Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribeis a soothsaying jaunt into the not-so-distant future, where 24/7 communication and chatroom alliances have evolved into tribal networks that secretly work against each other in shadowy online realms. The novel opens with its protagonist, the peevish Art Berry, on the roof of an asylum. He wonders if it's better to be smart or happy. His crucible is a pencil up the nose for a possible "homebrew lobotomy." To explain Art's predicament, Doctorow flashes backward and slowly fills in the blanks. As a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, Art is one of many in the now truly global village who have banded together out of like-minded affinity for a particular time zone and its circadian cycles. Art may have grown up in Toronto but his real homeland is an online grouping that prefers bagels and hot dogs to the fish and chips of their rivals who live on Greenwich Mean Time. As he rises through the ranks of the tribe, he is sent abroad to sabotage the traffic patterns and communication networks in the GMT tribe. Along the way, he comes across a humdinger of an idea that will solve a music piracy problem on the highways of his own beloved timezone, raise his status in the tribe and make him rich. If only he could have trusted his tightly wound girlfriend and fellow tribal saboteur, he probably wouldn't be on the booby hatch roof with that pencil up his nose.

As a musing on the future, Doctorow's extrapolation seems entirely plausible. And, not only is ESTa fascinating mental leap it's a witty and savvy tale that will appeal to anyone who's lived another life, however briefly, online. Jeremy Pugh

Little Brother

Cory Doctorow

A Place So Foreign and Eight More

Cory DoctorowWunderkind Cory Doctrow continues to display his orientation skills at the intersection of Humanity and Technology with the collection of short stories A Place So Foreign and 8 More. In the collection's titular tale, "A Place So Foreign," a 19th-century boy travels with his father, the Ambassador to 1975. But when Pa meets with an accident, young James becomes a living anachronism in 1898. Doctrow twists the time travel tale into a parable of data mining, as mysterious forces work to plunder the past for corporate gain. In one of several stories about a mysterious alien race who offers to give Earthers a hand up, he documents the adolescent rage of those left behind when the "mothaship" takes the anointed few into the brave new world. Finally, in "0wnz0red", Doctrow explores the dark side of Silicon Valley's connection to the military industrial complex by posing the question: What happens when hackers learn to hack the human body?

Doctrow is a new breed in an increasingly literate and valid subgenre of science fiction. He uses the traditional allegories of the form to explore more human and fragile connections. As the 21st century rockets ahead, he examines the consequences of our frenzy to embrace technology and predicts outcomes that are both charmingly optimistic and bleakly hollow. Jeremy Pugh

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Cory DoctorowWith Down and Out in the Magic Kingdomand Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow established himself as one of the leading voices of next-generation SF: inventive, optimistic, and comfortable with the sheer strangeness of tomorrow. Now Doctorow returns with a novel of wrenching oddity, heartfelt technological vision, and human pity set on the streets of Toronto today.

Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur in contemporary Toronto, who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in the bohemian neighborhood of Kensington. This naturally brings him in contact with the house full of students and layabouts next door, including a young woman who, in a moment of stress, reveals to him that she has wingswings, moreover, which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain; his mother is a washing machine; and among his brothers are a set of Russian nesting dolls.

Now two of the three nesting dolls, Edward and Frederick, are on his doorstepwell on their way to starvation, because their innermost member, George, has vanished. It appears that yet another brother, Davey, who Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned...bent on revenge.

Under such circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to involve himself with a visionary scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet connectivity, a conspiracy spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles of hardware from parts scavenged from the city's dumpsters. But Alan's past won't leave him aloneand Davey is only one of the powers gunning for him and all his friends.

Wildly imaginative, constantly whipsawing us between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Townis unlike any novel you have ever read.

Wilbur F. EastmanThis no-nonsense guide to canning, freezing, curing, and smoking meat, fish, and game is written in down-to-earth, informative, everyday language. The third edition of this perennial bestseller is completely revised and updated to comply with the latest USDA health and safety guidelines. Includes dozens of delicious recipes for homemade Beef Jerky, Pemmican, Venison Mincemeat, Corned Beef, Gepockelete (German-style cured pork), Bacon, Canadian Bacon, Smoked Sausage, Liverwurst, Bologna, Pepperoni, Fish Chowder, Cured Turkey, and a variety of hams. Learn tasty pickling methods for tripe, fish, beef, pork, and oysters. An excellent resource for anyone who loves meat but hates the steroids and chemicals in commercially available products.

XML Pocket Reference

Robert EcksteinEven hot dog Web coders proficient in XML need a little refresher once and a while. Although some portions of XML are still very fluid, the handy XML Pocket Referenceoffers quick access to the syntax and usage rules of this next-generation language.

At the front of the book, a crash course in XML quickly spells out the important terminology, along with extremely short examples of XML, Document Type Definition (DTD), and Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) documents. The book also includes a nice bulleted list of cautions and rules to follow if you want to create valid XML documents. A tip section entitled, "Unlearning Bad Habits" offers handy warnings that are especially useful for those of us who occasionally slip into sloppy HTML coding behaviors that XML won't tolerate.

The remainder of the title comprises reference sections devoted to XML, DTDs, XSL, XLink, and XPointer. These sections offer a balanced mix of both straight syntax references and brief general explanations of key topics. Short examples are in abundance to illustrate usage with accompanying explanatory text. The authors are very up-front about the changing nature of the XSL, XLink, and XPointer and point out that even their freshly published material on these subjects may soon be out of date.

You won't find any big-picture look at the importance or implementation of XML in the real world. However, if you're already sold on the technology and working with it, this little guide will be a handy companion. Stephen W Plain

The New World of Mr Tompkins : George Gamow's Classic Mr Tompkins in Paperback

George Gamow Russell Stannard Michael Edwards

Elementary Linear Algebra

Roland E. Larson Bruce H. Edwards

Elementary Linear Algebra

Roland E. Larson Bruce H. Edwards

Core Jini

W. Keith EdwardsWhile Jini promises to be a potential rival to CORBA and DCOM for general distributed development, the focus of Core Jiniis on using the technology to connect peripherals to networks via Java.

Traditional problems found in distributed computingand how Jini overcomes themare tackled first. After this overview, there is a simple "Hello World" example, as well as a solid guide to setting up and running the Jini tools. Then the book delves into Jini specifics, starting with "discovery" (which allows devices to find Jini services on the fly). The book explains in detail how Jini services advertise themselves using both multicast and unicast protocols.

Jini services are "leased" by clients, and a section on Jini's leasing protocol shows the details from both the server side and client side. All of the requirements for a "well-behaved" Jini service are summarized, along with a complete example for a print service. Core Jinigives the working Java developer all necessary technical information to do this. Richard Dragan

Carlton III EgremontSurely, our society must have passed some technological milestone in order for component software to merit a comic novella. Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveXattempts to enlighten the reader about Microsoft's distributed-computing solution without actually explaining the technology, as more gauche programming books frequently do.

This book is funny! To wit (so to speak), an excerpt:

In Visual Basic, you form windows using forms. A form is a window that you form. At first forms are unformed. You must form your forms using the form designer (formerly the former). In the form former, an unformed form forms a uniform formation....

You get the idea. This book is a hoot and a half. The basic idea is that a smarty-pants bespectacled rabbit and a hick farmer travel around together, having metaphorical experiences that (more or less) help explain how ActiveX works. Hey, Mr. Bunny makes about as much sense as any other approach to COM documentation, and he's a lot less pretentious.

Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveXwill appeal to people who already have a pretty good grasp of what Microsoft's component architecture is all aboutand who have realized it's a complicated morass worth a laugh or two. David Wall

Companion Through The Darkness : Inner Dialogues on Grief

Stephanie Ericsson

M. C. Escher

M. C. Escher

Visual C++ Windows Shell Programming

Dino EspositoThe Windows shell provides much of the look and feel of the Windows 98/Windows NT 4 desktop, and it offers many new possibilities for writing better programs. Visual C++ 6 Windows Shell Programmingprovides an excellent guide to understanding and programming the Windows shell, in a book filled with expert tips and useful code.

The book begins with the basics of the Windows desktop and taskbar and gives an overview of programming techniques. Besides the simpler shell C API, there are COM objects for manipulating the shell. Next the book covers file programming, such as finding and copying files, before moving on to explain how to modify shortcuts. The author presents multiple techniques for opening new programs and documents and shows how to modify the system icon tray.

Later, the book turns to Windows shell COM objects and looks at working with folders and other desktop objects. Material on the Windows Scripting Host (for batch processing) is also very useful. The author creates a sample Windows metafile (.WMF) viewer as a fuller example. The book closes with some notable material on the new Web View feature in Windows 98.

Even if you don't plan on programming extensively with the Windows shell, the material in this book can demystify what the shell is and how it operates. Reading Visual C++ 6 Windows Shell Programmingcan help you understand how Windows 98 and the Active Desktop really work while teaching you to be a skilled C++ Windows shell developer. Richard Dragan

I'm Grieving As Fast As I Can: How Young Widows and Widowers Can Cope and Heal

Linda Sones Feinberg

Calculus Students Solutions Manual Part 2

FINNEY

Calculus

Ross L Finney

Version Control with Subversion

C. Michael Pilato Ben Collins-Sussman Brian W. Fitzpatrick

Java Examples in A Nutshell

David Flanagan

Open Source Development with CVS: Learn How to Work With Open Source Software

Karl Franz Fogel Karl FogelThe need for a modern source-code management strategy in the distributed open-source community is paramount. The benevolent dictatorship model of open-source maintainers is only quasi-stable, but it is far better than the other extreme: the chaos of democratic code development.

The best available compromise is the concurrent versioning system (CVS), which introduces proctored code merging into source code management. CVS is ideally suited for worldwide open-source development, and the world is ready for monographs that address the management issues that Per Cederqvist explicitly avoided in his fine 164-page postscript manual distributed with the CVS tar-ball. What is the role of a maintainer/manager in establishing test protocols for code merges? What minimal functional level of developer communications is necessary for merges to remain stable? Is a maintainer-less release possible?

These questions go largely unanswered in Karl Fogel's new Open Source Development with CVS. Fogel's 300-page book consists of chapters alternating between CVS basics and common code maintenance issues. He includes a few anecdotes from open-source lore and lots of nonspecific commonsense guidelines on team software development.

Fogel is at his best when he is engaging us in thinking about what should and should not be under CVS control. He points out that complex relationships exist between developing code and its dependencies on intimately related applications, such as build tools themselves (gcc, autoconf) or partner applications (e.g., the server's client or the client's server). His brief discussion of strategies is too short to be satisfying.

Frustratingly, this book is chock-full of postmodern self-indulgences, such as his boasting reverence for technological ignorance. The discipline needed by good maintainers is missing here; Fogel's informal prose is often grating, and his copious parenthetical remarks are distracting or bullying (they sure are); one wonders where his editor was. Ultimately, his management arguments boil down to an endorsement for the benevolent dictatorship modela safe conclusion, but one that seems not to use CVS's merging capability for all it's worth. To the question of how to run a project, he responds, "Well, we're all still trying to figure that out, actually." True, and he isn't there yet, but at least he has the questions right. Peter Leopold

Girl Genius: Agatha Heterodyne and the Beetleburg Clank

Phil Foglio Kaja Foglio

The Pop-Up Book: Step-By-Step Instructions for Creating over 100 Original Paper Projects

Kent Beck Martin FowlerThe Extreme Programming (XP) paradigm has developers doing things like programming in pairs, writing tests to verify all code, and continuously refactoring designs for improved performance. Written by two of its inventors, Planning Extreme Programming shows you how to implement XP by using a simple, effective process. This remarkably short (yet remarkably useful) title will give any XP manager or programmer a perspective on delivering software that meets the needs of customers better.

Simplicity is the watchword of the XP software process. This book is virtually devoid of traditional software-engineering jargon and design diagrams, and yet does a good job of laying the foundation of how to perform XPwhich is all about working with a customer to deliver features incrementally.

The terminology in the book is commonsensical. (In the terms of XP, each iteration adds certain new features, or stories. It's up to the customer to decide what functionality is more important and will be delivered first. By never letting a working build get out of sight, the XP process virtually ensures that software will be close to what the customer wants.)

Early chapters borrow analogies from everyday experiencelike planning a trip or driving a carto set the stage for XP process planning. The book has plenty of advice for dealing with the stakeholders (customers) of a project. Because of confidentiality agreements, however, we don't get many details from the real world, although the discussion is anchored by a hypothetical project for planning the Web site of the future for travel, with some specifics.

There is plenty of advice for planning projects, based on individual and team "velocity" (a measure of productivity) and the likepractical suggestions for running daily, short status meetings (in which all of the participants stand up, to keep them short). Clearly, there's a culture that surrounds many XP teams, and this text does a good job of conveying some of this to the reader.

At fewer than 150 pages, Planning Extreme Programming is notably concise, and that's probably the whole point. Most shops today work on Internet time, which doesn't wait for extensive project analysis and design documents. In XP, you create working software from the very start. This book is an essential guide to anyone who's working in XP shops or who might be interested in what this innovative, iterative software process can offer. Richard Dragan

UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, Third Edition

Martin Fowler

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin"The first book to belong permanently to literature. It created a man."

 From the Introduction

Few men could compare to Benjamin Franklin. Virtually self-taught, he excelled as an athlete, a man of letters, a printer, a scientist, a wit, an inventor, an editor, and a writer, and he was probably the most successful diplomat in American history. David Hume hailed him as the first great philosopher and great man of letters in the New World.

Written initially to guide his son, Franklin's autobiography is a lively, spellbinding account of his unique and eventful life. Stylistically his best work, it has become a classic in world literature, one to inspire and delight readers everywhere.

Programming Concepts With the Ada Language (Pbi Series for the Computer and Data Processing Professional)

Inside the Personal Computer: An Illustrated Introduction in 3 Dimensions

Sharon Gallagher

Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book (Better Homes and Gardens Test Kitchen)

Jennifer Darling Better Homes and Gardens

The Magic Numbers of Doctor Matrix

Martin Gardner

GREAT BRITISH COOKING

Jane GarmeyThis book is a revelation to Americans who have never tasted real Cornish Pasties, Scotch Woodcock (a splendid version of scrambled eggs) or Brown Bread Ice Cream. From the sumptuous breakfasts that made England famous to the steamed puddings, trifles, meringues and syllabubs that are still renowned, no aspect of British cooking is overlooked. Soups, fish, meat and game, vegetables, sauces, high teas, scones, crumpets, hot cross buns, savories, preserves and sweets of all kinds are here in clear, precise recipes with ingredients and utensils translated into American terms.

Bathrooms: Plan, Remodel, Build

RA, Jerry GermerBathrooms: Plan, Remodel, Build provides homeowners with a comprehensive guide to updating or adding a bathroom, one of the most popular home improvements today. The first part of the book offers design ideas for master baths, powder rooms, family baths, kids' baths, and accessible baths. Lavish color photography accompanies the consumer-friendly text on today's design trends, including spa features, vanities, lighting, ventilation, and the latest bath products and materials. The second section provides detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to do the work, from floors to fixtures. These projects are supported with color photographs to help readers through the process from beginning to end.

Programming Language Concepts

Carlo Ghezzi

All Tomorrow's Parties

William GibsonAlthough Colin Laney (from Gibson's earlier novel Idoru) lives in a cardboard box, he has the power to change the world. Thanks to an experimental drug that he received during his youth, Colin can see "nodal points" in the vast streams of data that make up the worldwide computer network. Nodal points are rare but significant events in history that forever change society, even though they might not be recognizable as such when they occur. Colin isn't quite sure what's going to happen when society reaches this latest nodal point, but he knows it's going to be big. And he knows it's going to occur on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, which has been home to a sort of SoHo-esque shantytown since an earthquake rendered it structurally unsound to carry traffic.

Colin sends Barry Rydell (last seen in Gibson's novel Virtual Light) to the bridge to find a mysterious killer who reveals himself only by his lack of presence on the Net. Barry is also entrusted with a strange package that seems to be the home of Rei Toi, the computer-generated "idol singer" who once tried to "marry" a human rock star (she's also from Idoru). Barry and Rei Toi are eventually joined by Barry's old girlfriend Chevette (from Virtual Light) and a young boy named Silencio who has an unnatural fascination with watches. Together this motley assortment of characters holds the key to stopping billionaire Cody Harwood from doing whatever it is that will make sure he still holds the reigns of power after the nodal point takes place.

Although All Tomorrow's Partiesincludes characters from two of Gibson's earlier novels, it's not a direct sequel to either. It's a stand-alone book that is possibly Gibson's best solo work since Neuromancer. In the past, Gibson has let his brilliant prose overwhelm what were often lackluster (or nonexistent) story lines, but this book has it all: a good story, electric writing, and a group of likable and believable characters who are out to save the world ... kind of. The ending is not quite as supercharged as the rest of the novel and so comes off a bit flat, but overall this is definitely a winner. Craig E. Engler

Burning Chrome

William GibsonTen brilliant, streetwise, high-resolution stories from the man who coined the word cyberspace. Gibson's vision has become a touchstone in the emerging order of the 21st Century, from the computer-enhanced hustlers of Johnny Mnemonicto the technofetishist blues of Burning Chrome. With their vividly human characters and their remorseless, hot-wired futures, these stories are simultaneously science fiction at its sharpest and instantly recognizable Polaroids of the postmodern condition.

Count Zero

William GibsonTurner, corporate mercenary, wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him for a mission more dangerous than the one he's recovering from: Maas-Neotek's chief of R&D is defecting. Turner is the one assigned to get him out intact, along with the biochip he's perfected. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain otherpartiessome of whom aren't remotely human.

Bobby Newmark is entirely human: a rustbelt data-hustler totally unprepared for what comes his way when the defection triggers war in cyberspace. With voodoo on the Net and a price on his head, Newmark thinks he's only trying to get out alive. A stylish, streetsmart, frighteningly probable parable of the future and sequel to Neuromancer

The Difference Engine

WILLIAM GIBSON

Idoru

William Gibson

Mona Lisa Overdrive (Bantam Spectra Book)

WILLIAM GIBSON

Neuromancer (Remembering Tomorrow)

William Gibson

Pattern Recognition

William GibsonThe first of William Gibson's usually futuristic novels to be set in the present, Pattern Recognitionis a masterful snapshot of modern consumer culture and hipster esoterica. Set in London, Tokyo, and Moscow, Pattern Recognitiontakes the reader on a tour of a global village inhabited by power-hungry marketeers, industrial saboteurs, high-end hackers, Russian mob bosses, Internet fan-boys, techno archeologists, washed-out spies, cultural documentarians, and our heroine Cayce Pollarda soothsaying "cool hunter" with an allergy to brand names.

Pollard is among a cult-like group of Internet obsessives that strives to find meaning and patterns within a mysterious collection of video moments, merely called "the footage," let loose onto the Internet by an unknown source. Her hobby and work collide when a megalomaniac client hires her to track down whoever is behind the footage. Cayce's quest will take her in and out of harm's way in a high-stakes game that ultimately coincides with her desire to reconcile her father’s disappearance during the September 11 attacks in New York.

Although he forgoes his usual future-think tactics, this is very much a William Gibson novel, more so for fans who realize that Gibson's brilliance lies not in constructing new futures but in using astute observations of present-day cultural flotsam to create those futures. With Pattern Recognition, Gibson skips the extrapolation and focuses his acumen on our confusing contemporary world, using the precocious Pollard to personify and humanize the uncertain anxiety, optimistic hope, and downright fear many feel when looking to the future. The novel is filled with Gibson's lyric descriptions and astute observations of modern life, making it worth the read for both cool hunters and their prey. Jeremy Pugh

Virtual Light

WILLIAM GIBSONThe author of Neuromancertakes you to the vividly realized near future of 2005. Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California. Here the millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pick-pocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you richor get you killed. Now Berry and Chevette are on the run, zeroing in on the digitalized heart of DatAmerica, where pure information is the greatest high. And a mind can be a terrible thing to crash.

David E. GoldbergDavid Goldberg's Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization and Machine Learningis by far the bestselling introduction to genetic algorithms. Goldberg is one of the preeminent researchers in the fieldhe has published over 100 research articles on genetic algorithms and is a student of John Holland, the father of genetic algorithmsand his deep understanding of the material shines through. The book contains a complete listing of a simple genetic algorithm in Pascal, which C programmers can easily understand. The book covers all of the important topics in the field, including crossover, mutation, classifier systems, and fitness scaling, giving a novice with a computer science background enough information to implement a genetic algorithm and describe genetic algorithms to a friend.

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships

John Gray John Gray

Clanbook: Malkavian (Vampire: The Masquerade Novels)

Daniel Greenberg

The Book of Nod

Sam Chupp David D. Gragert Andrew Greenberg

68Hc11 Microcontroller (Saunders Golden Sunburst Series)

Joseph D. Greenfield

In Search of Schrodinger's Cat: Quantum Physics And Reality

JOHN GRIBBINPart history book and part remedial physics text for those who lost interest when the equations started getting unintuitive, In Search of Schrödinger's Catexplains quantum physics in a way that's not only clear, but also enjoyable.

Gribbin opens with the subjects that most physics professors have just started to examine at the end of the semester: The mysterious character of light, the valence concept in Nils Bohr's atomic model, radioactive decay, and the physics of life-defining DNA all get clear, comprehensive, and witty coverage. This book reveals the beauty and mystery that underlies everything in the universe.

Does this book claim to explain quantum physics without math? No. Math is too central to physics to be bypassed. But if you can do basic algebra, you can understand the equations in In Search of Schrödinger's Cat. Gribbin is the physics teacher everyone should have in high school or college: kind without being a pushover, knowledgeable without being condescending, and clearly expressive without being boring. Gribbin's book belongs on the shelf of every pre-calculus student. It also deserves a place in the library of everyone who was scared away from advanced physics prematurely.

Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality : Solving the Quantum Mysteries Tag: Author of In Search of Schrod. Cat

John Gribbin

Professional Dcom Programming

Richard GrimesProfessional DCOM Programmingis a dense, comprehensive tome that covers everything an experienced C++ programmer could want to know about DCOM, Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model. Author Richard Grimes covers DCOM's origins, differences from COM, and techniques for writing both DCOM clients and servers. What the book sometimes lacks in readability it makes up in thoroughness: nothing is left out, from security to multithreading, and the level of detail reached within each section is remarkable.

W. Scott Means Elliotte Rusty HaroldContinuing in the tradition of the Nutshell series, XML in a Nutshellprovides a dense tutorial on its subject, as well as a useful day-to-day reference. While the reader isn't expected to have prior expertise in XML, this book is most effective as an add-on to a more introductory tutorial because of its relatively fast pace.

The authors set out to systematicallyand rapidlycover the basics of XML first, namely the history of the markup language and the various languages and technologies that compose the standard. In this first section, they discuss the basics of XML markup, Document Type Definitions (DTDs), namespaces, and Unicode. From there, the authors move into "narrative-centric documents" in a section that appropriately focuses on the application of XML to books, articles, Web pages and other readable content.

This book definitely presupposes in the reader an aptitude for picking up concepts quickly and for rapidly building cumulative knowledge. Code examples are usedonly to illustrate the particular point in questionbut not in excess. The book gets into "data-centric" XML, exploring the difference between the object-driven Document Object Model (DOM) and the event-driven Simple API for XML (SAX). However, these areas are a little underpowered and offer a bit less detail about this key area than the reader will expect.

At the core of any Nutshell book is the reference section, and the installment found inside this text is no exception. Here, the XML 1.0 standard, XPath, XSLT, DOM, SAX, and character sets are covered. Some material that is covered earlier in the booksuch as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)is not re-articulated, however. XML in a Nutshellis not the only book on XML you should have, but it is definitely one that no XML coder should be without. Stephen W. Plain

Bethany HealdThe most difficult thing about making these cookies? Not gobbling them up all at once! Serve them with coffee, put a few in a child’s lunchbox as a surprise, hang them from a Christmas tree, or tuck them into a pretty box as a gift: with these recipes and simple decorating ideas, anyone can bake these tasty and beautiful treats. Many of the recipes are freezer-friendly, all have been tested to assure that they work perfectly every time, and there are even templates for creating cookies in every shape from butterflies to the ever-popular dinosaur. Enjoy decadent nibbles such as bitter chocolate cookies decorated with gold leaf; fun teddy bear cookies; a savory delicacy such as parmesan cookies dusted with cayenne pepper; and a healthy Banana Bran cookie.

Stranger In a Strange Land

Robert A. Heinlein

Ultimate Bar Book: The Comprehensive Guide to Over 1,000 Cocktails

Mittie HellmichUltimate Bar Bookis the first and only guide to classic and new drink recipes. Loaded with essential-to-know topics such as barware, tools, and mixing tips, this book has it all. As a mistress of mixology, the author has the classics down to a T the Martini, the Bloody Mary, plus the many variations (the Dirty Martini, the Virgin Mary). And then there are all the creative new elixirs the author brings to the table, like the Tasmanian Twister Cocktail or the Citron Sparkler. Illustrations show precisely what type of glass should be used for each drink. With dozens of recipes for garnishes, rims, infusions, and syrups; punches, gelatin shooters, hot drinks, and non-alcoholic beverages; and let's not forget an essential selection of hangover remedies, Ultimate Bar Bookis nothing short of top-shelf.

The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook

Beth Hensperger

Mr. Wizard's Supermarket Science

DON HERBERT

Salvador Dali

Jessica Hodge

The Areas of My Expertise

John HodgmanIn the great tradition of the American almanac, The Areas of My Expertiseis a brilliant and hilarious compendium of handy reference tables, fascinating trivia, and sage wisdom on all topics large and small. Although bestsellers such as Poor Richard’s Almanackand The Book of Listswere certainly valuable, they also were largely true. Here is a different kind of handy desk reference, one in which all of the historical oddities and amazing true facts are sifted through the singular, illuminating imagination of John Hodgman—which is the nice way of saying: He made it all up.

John Hodgman brings his considerable expertise to bear in answering all of the questions book buyers have been asking:
-What are the mottoes of the 51 United States?
THE ANSWER IS PROVIDED
-Who were the U.S. presidents who had hooks for hands?
THE ANSWER IS PROVIDED
-What role does the Yale secret society "Skull and Bones" play in the secret world government?
THERE IS NO SECRET WORLD GOVERNMENT
-What was the menu at the first Thanksgiving, and did it include eels?
Technically, that is two questions, but do not apologize, for John Hodgman shall answer them both . . . LATER.
-Aside from a compendium of fake trivia, what is the best kind of book to write?
A SIMPLE TABLE OF THE 55 MOST DRAMATIC LITERARY SITUATIONS PROVIDES THE ANSWER, and John Hodgman is the author of that table.

Imagine if The Book of Listshad been rewritten by Peter Cook and Jorge Luis Borges under the pseudonym of "John Hodgman" and then renamed The Areas of My Expertise, and you will only begin to have a sense of the dizzying, uproarious, sublimely weird, and strangely wise journey that is contained within this book (along with all the pages and words).

Perfect for anyone who thirsts for knowledge, and especially for collectors of books of fake trivia, The Areas of My Expertiseoffers through absurdity a better understanding of the world we share—and recognizes that while the truth may be stranger than fiction, it is never as strange as lies . . . or as true.

Alan Turing: The Enigma

Andrew Hodges Douglas HofstadterAlan Turing died in 1954, but the themes of his life epitomize the turn of the millennium. A pure mathematician from a tradition that prided itself on its impracticality, Turing laid the foundations for modern computer science, writes Andrew Hodges:

Alan had proved that there was no "miraculous machine" that could solve all mathematical problems, but in the process he had discovered something almost equally miraculous, the idea of a universal machine that could take over the work of anymachine.

During World War II, Turing was the intellectual star of Bletchley Park, the secret British cryptography unit. His work cracking the German's Enigma machine code was, in many ways, the first triumph of computer science. And Turing died because his identity as a homosexual was incompatible with cold-war ideas of security, implemented with machines and remorseless logic: "It was his own invention, and it killed the goose that laid the golden eggs."

Andrew Hodges's remarkable insight weaves Turing's mathematical and computer work with his personal life to produce one of the best biographies of our time, and the basis of the Derek Jacobi movie Breaking the Code. Hodges has the mathematical knowledge to explain the intellectual significance of Turing's work, while never losing sight of the human and social picture:

In this sense his life belied his work, for it could not be contained by the discrete state machine. At every stage his life raised questions about the connection (or lack of it) between the mind and the body, thought and action, intelligence and operations, science and society, the individual and history.

And Hodges admits what all biographers know, but few admit, about their subjects: "his inner code remains unbroken." Alan Turing is still an enigma. Mary Ellen Curtin

Douglas HofstadterDouglas Hofstadter, best known for his masterpiece Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,tackles the subject of artificial intelligence and machine learning in his thought-provoking work Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies,written in conjunction with the Fluid Analogies Research Group at the University of Michigan. Driven to discover whether computers can be made to "think" like humans, Hofstadter and his colleagues created a variety of computer programs that extrapolate sequences, apply pattern-matching strategies, make analogies, and even act "creative." As always, Hofstadter's work requires devotion on the part of the reader, but rewards him with fascinating insights into the nature of both human and machine intelligence.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Douglas R. HofstadterTwenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braidis still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.

Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bachwas making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel's Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.

The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won't ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter's best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet Gödel, Escher, Bachremains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century's best for anyone who's interested in computers and their potential for realintelligence. Richard Dragan

Editors of Creative HomeownerToday's homeowners are looking to create additional storage space in the home with the most design flair possible. Home Storage addresses a problem that is common to all homeowners: lack of adequate storage. The book presents the reader with the latest in storage solutions from some of the country's leading designers. The book also covers the latest in storage ideas and products. For the do-it-yourselfer, there are 24 fully illustrated projects for the kitchen, bath, bedroom, living room, and utility room to improve the storage possibilities of any home. An extensive techniques section provides the novice handyperson with the skills they will need to complete the projects.

Kitchens: Plan, Remodel, Build

Editors of Creative HomeownerOffers a complete design and installation package for anyone interested in remodeling or updating a kitchen-or building one from scratch. Latest in kitchen design trends, plus step-by-step construction techniques. More than 550 full-color photos and illustrations.

Anne Hooper's Kama Sutra

Anne HooperOne might think a former Penthouse Forummagazine editor would be in over her head when it came to interpreting the sacred Kama Sutrafor contemporary lovers. Surprisingly, Anne Hooper has grasped the subtle, but more important, messages of India's traditional love manuals. She discourages readers from focusing on accomplishing distorted poses, as if they were athletic feats. Instead, she has written a compelling commentary that encourages readers to emphasize pressure points, manners, artistic freedom, and most of all finding and pursuing a loving sexual relationship rather than an overly choreographed one. Almost every page is illustrated with tasteful photos of nude lovers demonstrating the many sacred positions, while Hooper's text offers suggestions on how to apply the ancient teachings to contemporary lovemaking. Gail Hudson

Anne Hooper's Pocket Kama Sutra: A New Guide to the Ancient Arts of Love

Craig HuntNetworking Personal Computers with TCP/IPis a comprehensive guide to connecting a personal computer to a network that is running TCP/IP. Detailed sections cover various flavors of Microsoft operating systems (DOS, Windows 95, Windows NT) and explain in depth the steps necessary to configure the network. Additional sections cover configuration and boot control, mail, and services such as printing and file serving. Replete with screen shots, Networking Personal Computers with TCP/IPwill be an invaluable companion as you wade through each task.

The Essentials of C++ (Essentials)

David Hunter D. Hunter

Metalogic: An Introduction to the Metatheory of Standard First Order Logic

Geoffrey Hunter

A Concise Introduction to Logic (Philosophy)

Patrick J. Hurley

Gnomes

WILL HUYGEN

Ghost Sightings

Brian Innes

Mac OS X for Java Geeks

Will Iverson

The Crown of Kings (Steve Jackson's Sorcery, Sorcery! 4)

Steve Jackson

The Seven Serpents (Steve Jackson's Sorcery, Sorcery! 3)

Steve Jackson

Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing

Edgar V. Roberts Henry E. Jacobs

Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills

Cynthia Gibas Per Jambeck

Extreme Programming Installed

Ron Jeffries Ann Anderson Chet Hendrickson Ronald E. Jeffries

Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends

PENN JILLETTE

Ingenious Mechanisms for Designers and Inventors, 1930-67

Franklin D. Jones

Ingenious Mechanisms for Designers and Inventors, 1930-67

Franklin D. Jones

Ingenious Mechanisms for Designers and Inventors, 1930-67

Franklin D. Jones

How to Mutate and Take Over the World

ST. JUDE St. JudeIf you thought the media-cyberspace-information-overload techno Tower of Babel had reached dizzying heights before, you clearly never dreamed you'd be exposed to a novel that reads like someone tossed Douglas Adams, William Gibson, Mark Leyner and Thomas Pynchon into a Cuisinart and hit the puree button. This self-described "exploded post-novel" can be read front to back, back to front or grazed in snippets. Probably the first novel you can channel-surf.

COMPLETE STORIES (Schocken Classics)

FRANZ KAFKA

The Trial (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

FRANZ KAFKA

R. Crumb's Kafka

R. Crumb Franz KafkaPart illustrated biography, part comics adaptation, R. CRUMB'S KAFKA is a vibrant biography that examines this Czech writer and his works in a way that a bland texbook never could! R. CRUMB'S KAFKA goes far beyond being explication or popularization or survey. It's a work of art in its own right, a very rare example of what happens when one very idiosyncratic artist absorbs another into his worldview without obliterating the individuality of the absorbed one. Crumb's art is filled with Kafka's insurmountable neuroses. They are all there: Gregor Samsa's sister, the luscious Milena Jesenska, the Advacate's "nurse" Leni, Olda and Frieda, and the ravishing Dora Diamant-drawn in that mixture of self-command, tantalizing knowingness, and sly sexuality, that amazonian randines and thick-limbed physicality that is Crumb. . . Crumb's idiosyncratic illustrations add a new dimension to the already idiosyncratic world of Kafka.

Includes adaptations of "The Judgment,""The Trial,""The Castle,""A Hunger Artist," and "The Metamorphosis."

Hyperspace : A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension

MICHIO KAKUHow many dimensions do you live in? Three? Maybe that's all your commonsense sense perception perceives, but there is growing and compelling evidence to suggest that we actually live in a universe of ten real dimensions. Kaku has written an extraordinarily lucid and thought-provoking exploration of the theoretical and empirical bases of a ten-dimensional universe and even goes so far as to discuss possible practical implicationssuch as being able to escape the collapse of the universe. Yikes. Highly Recommended.

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

Stanislaw Lem Christine Rose Adele Kandel

I Was A Teenage Dominatrix

Shawna Kenney"You can only blame your parents for so much," says Shawna Kenney in her breezy memoir, I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, quickly disassociating herself from the common stereotype of the sex worker as a desperate victim of a male-dominated culture. Indeed, while Kenney's career choice may be shocking to some, her affable, conversational style reveals how an intelligent college student, short on cash, finds dominatrix work a viable way of making ends meettherethere's no sex, it's great money, and there's plenty of time for homework.

After guiding readers through a largely uneventful childhood and rebellious adolescence, Kenney ranges through a wide collection of professional anecdotes that are by turns hilarious, downright disgusting, and even poignant. Cranky from having to wear uncomfortable stiletto heels, for instance, Kenney finds a creative way to gain relief: "'Remove my shoes, you stupid slut,' I ordered.... From then on I was the barefoot dominatrix. I'm sure high heels were designed by some man, anyway." Many of the most unusual clients, however, are those who aren't interested in heels or bullwhipsthey pay just to talk. "My wife died twelve years ago," sobs one client. "I haven't been this close to a woman since." Another, a cross-dresser from Argentina, only wants acceptance: "I come from a country where it is very important to be macho. To be like me is a disgrace." Along the way, Kenney reveals keen insight into what goes on behind the closed doors of so-called "normal" people and gains greater understanding of her own attitudes toward friends and romance. With the conspiratorial tone of a best girlfriend conversing over coffee, she shares moments of laughter and tears (as well as a few other bodily fluids), but never once resorts to pure shock or self-pity. Those seeking a morality tale of how the "bad" girl gets her comeuppance should look elsewhere. This is a refreshing, honest portrait of a young woman determined to make something of herself on her own terms. Ginger Dzerk

Subterraneans

Jack Kerouac

Night Shift (Signet)

Stephen King

The Running Man

Stephen KingStephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) crafted The Running Manearly in his career, though after such mega-hits as Carrieand The Shining. A bit of a departure from the supernatural horror that is most frequently associated with his work, the novel describes a science fiction dystopia where market capitalism and television game shows have spiraled out of control, and the separation between the haves and the have-nots has been formalized with separate currencies. King establishes characters quickly, creating sympathy in the first few pages for Ben Richardswhose 18-month-old baby girl is suffering from a horrible cough, perhaps pneumonia. Not able to afford medicine, Richards enters himself in the last-chance money-making scheme of the Free-Vee games. The games include Treadmill to Bucks, in which heart-attack prone contestants struggle to outlast a progressively demanding treadmill, or the accurately named Swim the Crocodiles. After a rigorous battery of physical and mental examinations, Richards is assigned "Elevator Six"the path of a chosen fewthat leads to The Running Mangame. In this game, the stakes and the prizes are raised. Success means a life of luxury. Failure means death. Unfortunately, few ever win the game; in fact, as the producer tells Richards, in six years no one has survived.

The Running Manis a short book, tightly written to be read and enjoyed quickly. The future world it depicts is vividly captured with a few essential details.The action is also fast paced and, though the novel differs from much of King's other work, the sardonic social commentary reveals a pleasing glimmer of King's characteristically twisted sense of humor. Patrick O'Kelley

The Gunslinger

Stephen King

Florid Victorian Ornament (Dover Pictorial Archives)

Karl Klimsch

Transact-SQL Programming

Lee Gould Andrew Zanevsky Kevin Kline

Artificial Intelligence

Elaine Rich Kevin KnightArtificial Intelligenceis a somewhat dated introduction to the subject. If you are looking for an introduction to core topics in artificial intelligence (AI), such as logic, knowledge representation, and search, this book has something to offer. However, if you want to learn about some of the newer areas of AI, such as genetic algorithms, neural networks, and intelligent agents, you will wish to select a different text.

Secrets of a Super Hacker

Knightmare the Knightmare

Wireless Java : Developing with Java 2, Micro Edition

Jonathan Knudsen

The Physics of Star Trek

Lawrence M. KraussWhat warps when you're traveling at warp speed? What's the difference between the holodeck and a hologram? What happens when you get beamed up? What is the difference between a Wormhole and a Black Hole? What is antimatter and why does the Enterprise need it?

Discover the answers to these and many other fascinating questions as a renowned physicist and deicated Trekker explores The Physics of Star Trek.

Oracle SQL : The Essential Reference

David C. Kreines

Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition

Jonathan Corbet Alessandro Rubini Greg Kroah-Hartman

Virtual Realities: A Shadowrun Sourcebook

Tom Dowd Chris Kubasik

The Spymaster's Handbook

Michael Kurland

A Swiftly Tilting Planet

MADELEINE L'ENGLE

A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L'Engle

Software Engineering: Planning for Change

David Alex Lamb

Learning the vi Editor (Nutshell Series)

Linda Lamb

Macbeth (Cliffs Complete)

William Shakespeare Christopher Morrow Sidney Lamb

How to Get Anything on Anybody

Lee Lapin

How to Get Anything on Anybody: The Encyclopedia of Personal Surveillance, Book II (How to Get Anything on Anybody)

Lee Lapin

Yoga for Beginners

Mark Ansari Liz Lark

Apache: the Definitive Guide (With CD-ROM)

Ben Laurie Peter LaurieWith distributions for both Unix and 32-bit Windows environments, the Apache Web server boasts reliability, security, and scalabilityand it's free. Apache: The Definitive Guideshows Apache administrators how to perform their jobs, detailing the server through version 1.3.

The authorsone of them a member of the Apache development teambegin with an academic discussion of what Web servers do before walking the reader through the process of installing Apache. Installation gets much attentionreaders find out, step by step, how to set up a Web site (or several) under Apache, and how to set up Web site security and other preferences properly. The book also provides in-depth discussions of particular aspects of Apache operation, including MIME handling, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and security features such as authentication and caching.

For the programmers in the crowd, this book documents the Apache API with discussions of resource pools and their allocation, plus a full API reference. A tutorial explains how to write Apache extension modules in C. In all matters, Apache: The Definitive Guidecovers both Unix and Win32 machines, but it places more emphasis on the Unix port. The complete source code of Apache 1.3 appears on the CD-ROM that ships with the book. David Wall

Virtual Reality Playhouse

Nicholas Lavroff

The Complete Idiot's Guide to 401(k) Plans

Wayne G. Bogosian Dee Lee

Programming Sudoku (Technology in Action)

Wei-Meng LeeSudoku is the wildly popular new puzzle game. Sudoku puzzles are 9x9 grids, and each square in the grid consists of a 3x3 subgrid called a region. Your goal is to fill in the squares so that each column, row, and region contains the numbers 1 through 9 exactly once. And some squares already contain numbers or symbols, which lend clues toward the solution.

Programming Sudokuprovides you with great approaches to building and solving Sudoku and other similar puzzles. Using ingenious artificial intelligence and game theory techniques, you'll learn how to get a computer to solve these puzzles for you.

This is a fun, intriguing read whether you're a novice or advanced programmer. It acknowledges the.NET platform as a base, but you'll find this book interesting whatever your programming background. The core techniques in the book enable you to solve Sudoku on any programming platform.

Mobile Cellular Telecommunications: Analog and Digital Systems

William C. Y. Lee

The Cyberiad

Stanislaw Lem

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

Lawrence Lessig"We, the Net People, in order to form a more perfect Transfer Protocol..." might be recited in future fifth-grade history classes, says attorney Lawrence Lessig. He turns the now-traditional view of the Internet as an uncontrollable, organic entity on its head, and explores the architecture and social systems that are changing every day and taming the frontier. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspaceis his well-reasoned, undeniably cogent series of arguments for guiding the still-evolving regulatory processes, to ensure that we don't find ourselves stuck with a system that we find objectionable. As the former Communist-bloc countries found, a constitution is still one of our best guarantees against the dark side of chaos; and Lessig promotes a kind of document that accepts the inevitable regulatory authority of both government and commerce, while constraining them within values that we hold by consensus.

Lessig holds that those who shriek the loudest at the thought of interference in cyberdoings, especially at the hands of the government, are blind to the ever-increasing regulation of the Net (admittedly, without badges or guns) by businesses that find little opposition to their schemes from consumers, competitors, or cops. The Internet will be regulated, he says, and our window of opportunity to influence the design of those regulations narrows each day. How will we make the decisions that the Framers of our paper-and-ink Constitution couldn't foresee, much less resolve? Lessig proclaims that many of us will have to wake up fast and get to work before we lose the chance to draft a networked Bill of Rights. Rob Lightner

Java(TM) Native Interface: Programmer's Guide and Specification

Sheng LiangWritten for the experienced Java developer, The Java Native Interfacedocuments the latest in native code programming for the Java platform using the Java Native Interface (JNI) with C/C++. Author Sheng Liang built the book around "dos and don'ts," even specifying within the introduction when you should and when you should not use JNI. Though sometimes densely written, this title certainly conveys a good deal of technical information on using native code with Java.

After a simple JNI "Hello World" code example, this book explores multiple aspects of the JNI API, starting with the use of Java strings and arrays within native code. Liang follows by transitioning into calling Java members and methods in C/C++. Here the author presents caching strategies for improving the performance of native code that interacts with or executes Java programs, including a discussion of local and global references that incorporates global weak references in Java 2.

The book also looks at handling exceptions within C/C++ code, as well as tips for working with Java threads. The author shows how to simplify access to C/C++ code through shared stubs and how to use peer classes to encapsulate native code from within Java. A section on common traps and pitfalls lists some common pitfalls to avoid when working with the JNI. After presenting the JNI specification, the author provides the most immediately useful text in the bookover 100 pages of reference material listing JNI data types and methods.

As a reference and programming guide, The Java Native Interfaceprovides concise and timely technical details on getting Java and C/C++ code to coexist within your projects. Richard Dragan

Einstein's Dreams

Alan LightmanIf you liked the eerie whimsy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Steven Millhauser's Little Kingdoms, or Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths, you will love Alan Lightman's ethereal yet down-to-earth book Einstein's Dreams. Lightman teaches physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helping bridge the light-year-size gap between science and the humanities, the enemy camps C.P. Snow famously called The Two Cultures.

Einstein's Dreamsbecame a bestseller by delighting both scientists and humanists. It is technically a novel. Lightman uses simple, lyrical, and literal details to locate Einstein precisely in a place and timeBerne, Switzerland, spring 1905, when he was a patent clerk privately working on his bizarre, unheard-of theory of relativity. The town he perceives is vividly described, but the waking Einstein is a bit player in this drama.

The book takes flight when Einstein takes to his bed and we share his dreams, 30 little fables about places where time behaves quite differently. In one world, time is circular; in another a man is occasionally plucked from the present and deposited in the past: "He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future ... he is forced to witness events without being part of them ... an inert gas, a ghost ... an exile of time." The dreams in which time flows backward are far more sophisticated than the time-tripping scenes in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, though science-fiction fans may yearn for a sustained yarn, which Lightman declines to provide. His purpose is simply to study the different kinds of time in Einstein's mind, each with its own lucid consequences. In their tone and quiet logic, Lightman's fables come off like Bach variations played on an exquisite harpsichord. People live for one day or eternity, and they respond intelligibly to each unique set of circumstances. Raindrops hang in the air in a place of frozen time; in another place everyone knows one year in advance exactly when the world will end, and acts accordingly.

"Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic," writes Lightman. "Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting.... In this world, artists are joyous." In another dream, time slows with altitude, causing rich folks to build stilt homes on mountaintops, seeking eternal youth and scorning the swiftly aging poor folk below. Forgetting eventually how they got there and why they subsist on "all but the most gossamer food," the higher-ups at length "become thin like the air, bony, old before their time."

There is no plot in this small volumeitit's more like a poetry collection than a novel. Like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, it's a mind-stretching meditation by a scientist who's been to the far edge of physics and is back with wilder tales than Marco Polo's. And unlike many admirers of Hawking, readers of Einstein's Dreamshave a high probability of actually finishing it.

STL Pocket Reference

Ray Lischner

The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick

Jonathan LittmanJonathan Littman takes us into the mind of Kevin Mitnick, cyberspace's most wanted hacker. Drawing on over fifty hours of phone conversations with Mitnick on the run, Littman reveals Mitnick's double life; his narrow escapes; his new identities; his mastery of "social engineering"; his obsession with revenge. The electronic adventure story that emerges reads like a spy thriller, but also raises questions about Internet security and tensions between constitutional rights of privacy and law enforcement. A good companion piece to the other side of the story, Tsutomu Shimomura's book Takedown.

The Ultimate Groom's Guide

Alex LluchDesigned to be a handy, no-nonsense book which covers only those aspects of the wedding planning process that the groom is tyipcally responsible for.

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual

Christopher Locke Rick Levine Doc Searls Christopher LockeHow would you classify a book that begins with the salutation, "People of Earth..."? While the captains of industry might dismiss it as mere science fiction, The Cluetrain Manifestois definitely of this day and age. Aiming squarely at the solar plexus of corporate America, authors Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger show how the Internet is turning business upside down. They proclaim that, thanks to conversations taking place on Web sites and message boards, and in e-mail and chat rooms, employees and customers alike have found voices that undermine the traditional command-and-control hierarchy that organizes most corporate marketing groups. "Markets are conversations," the authors write, and those conversations are "getting smarter faster than most companies." In their view, the lowly customer service rep wields far more power and influence in today's marketplace than the well-oiled front office PR machine.

The Cluetrain Manifestobegan as a Web site (www.cluetrain.com) in 1999 when the authors, who have worked variously at IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Linux Journal, and NPR, posted 95 theses that pronounced what they felt was the new reality of the networked marketplace. For example, thesis no. 2: "Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors"; thesis no. 20: "Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them"; thesis no. 62: "Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall"; thesis no. 74: "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it." The book enlarges on these themes through seven essays filled with dozens of stories and observations about how business gets done in America and how the Internet will change it all. While Cluetrainwill strike many as loud and over the top, the message itself remains quite relevant and unique. This book is for anyone interested in the Internet and e-commerce, and is especially important for those businesses struggling to navigate the topography of the wired marketplace. All aboard! Harry C. Edwards

Penn & Teller's How to Play in Traffic

Penn Jillette Teller Anthony LoewWhile Star Trekfans, role-playing game fans, and even comic book fans eventually find each other and develop something like social groups, teenage magicians are, due to the rarity of their particular geek kink, more likely to remain socially retarded than any other group. That isolation and talent for magic allowed Penn & Teller a great deal of time to devote to revenge, mayhem, and making others look foolish. Now they share their techniques, as well as the wisdom one gains from acquiring happiness only after being ostracized and ridiculed, in Penn & Teller's How to Play in Traffic. A mixture of tricks you can do in hotel rooms, cars, and planes, some ill-advised methods for screwing with the minds of airport security personnel, and a series of memoirs of the unusual people they've met on their B-venue journeys around the world, How to Play in Trafficis not only funny (as one would expect from Penn & Teller) but also oddly insightful.

Kyle LoudonWritten with the intermediate to advanced C programmer in mind, Mastering Algorithms with Cdelivers a no-nonsense guide to the most common algorithms needed by real-world developers.

The highlight of the book has to be its concise and readable C functions for all the algorithms presented here, including basics like linked lists, stacks to trees, graphs, and sorting/searching algorithms. The C functions that implement these algorithms are clearly printed and remarkably easy to read. You can use this sample code directly or adapt it into your C/C++ code.

Although mathematical concepts like Big-O notation are discussed, the authors don't get bogged down in the computer science theory surrounding algorithms. Instead, they present the most tried-and-true algorithms available today in an efficient format. Besides introducing each algorithm, they describe how each is used in computing today, along with a short demo application. Some of these samples are quite low-level, such as a virtual memory manager implemented with linked lists. Most examples are more of general interest, such as a graphing example that counts network hops.

Each section ends with questions and answers about how the algorithms work, along with references to other algorithms (both in the book and from other sources). The authors concentrate on the most useful algorithms available today and don't try to cover every available variation. Busy readers will appreciate the intelligent selectionand efficient presentationused here.

There are a number of books on C algorithms, but Master Algorithms with Cis one of the most concise and immediately useful. It's a perfect choice for the working C/C++ programmer who's in a hurry to find just the right algorithm for writing real-world code. Richard Dragan

Lincoln Stein Doug MacEachernWriting Apache Modules with Perl and Cwill allow you to enhance your Apache HTTP server in just about any way you'd like. Overall, it is an excellent book, and it has a lot of good information and terrific examples on everything from "Content Handlers" to customizing the Apache server configuration process.

It's quickly apparent that Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern spent valuable time writing this book considering the breadth of their subject and the depth they devote to it. The only downside to the book is that it's kind of hard to explain all of the API functionality without assuming a minimum level of competence from the audience. For that reason, this book might be a bit intimidating to novice programmers, but it really rewards you if you put time into it and tinker with things.

The book also works well as a source of ideas and inspiration for when you have to write your own server modules, and I'd recommend it if you want to customize your Apache server or speed up your Perl CGI programs. Doug Beaver

DEBORAH MADISONThe elegant simplicity and exquisite flavor of Deborah Madison's food make her one of America's leading cooks. In Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone,she offers more than great food: her book includes comprehensive information about ingredients and techniques, plus more than 800 recipes. The recipes range from dishes as familiar as Guacamole to those as distinctive as Green Lentils with Roasted Beets and Preserved Lemons, and Cashew Curry. The 124-page chapter titled "Vegetables: The Heart of the Matter" is a virtual book of culinary revelations; you could use it as a manual on buying and preparing vegetables. Madison provides equally inspired recipes and guidance for everything from grains and soy to dairy foods and desserts.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Gregory MaguireWhen Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?

Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wickedis about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to be the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, a smart, prickly and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.

Michael ManganFrom David Blaine’s death-defying feats of will to Harry Potter’s boarding-school victories against evil forces, the darker side of magic and its performance clearly strikes a cultural nerve. The conjuror’s act of bringing the impossible into being and summoning both the grotesque and marvelous with a sudden gesture challenges spectators’ assumptions of reality and fantasy. Performing Dark Artsexplores the paradox of the conjuror and the broader cultural implications of magic’s assault on human perception.

Michael Mangan illuminates the history of the conjuring arts and tests the boundaries of theatrical scholarship by analyzing magic acts alongside more conventional dramatic forms. This bracingly original volume discusses the performances of individual magicians and public reception of their acts and locates the mysterious cultural significance of the dark arts and those who practice them. Shining a light on the grey area between acting and being, perception and reality, Performing Dark Artsis a book that will open your mind to the possibilities of magic.

Maze: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle

Christopher Manson

Brief History of Tomorrow: The Future Past and Present

Jonathan Margolis

The Hypochondriac's Handbook

Wendy Marston

MISS MANNERS' GUIDE FOR THE TURN-OF-THE-MILLENNIUM

Judith Martin

What Dreams May Come : A Novel

Richard MathesonA classic novel of love after death, from one our greatest fantasy writers. The premise is deceptively simple: Chris Neilson has died in a car accident, but his life-forcehis spiritis still conscious of this plane of reality. And he is still too in love with his wife, Ann, to completely let go. She in turn does not want to go on living without him, as each regards the other as their soul mate. What Chris will do to get back with Ann after she dies makes for one of the most unusual love stories ever told. Even though the story can be enjoyed as pure fantasy, what makes What Dreams May Comeunique is how the author spent years researching the subject of life after death. (An exhaustive bibliography is included to verify this.) And while Matheson admits that the characters are of course fictional, he also states that "With few exceptions, every other detail is derived exclusively from research." Whether, after reading this novel, one believes in life after death is of course a matter of opinion. At least you'll entertain the possibility that, even though we may not live forever, true love can be eternal. Stanley Wiater

Psychology

Margaret W. Matlin

The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse

Norman Matloff, Peter Jay SalzmanDebugging is crucial to successful software development, but even many experienced programmers find it challenging. Sophisticated debugging tools are available, yet it may be difficult to determine which features are useful in which situations. The Art of Debugging is your guide to making the debugging process more efficient and effective.

The Art of Debugging illustrates the use three of the most popular debugging tools on Linux/Unix platforms: GDB, DDD, and Eclipse. The text-command based GDB (the GNU Project Debugger) is included with most distributions. DDD is a popular GUI front end for GDB, while Eclipse provides a complete integrated development environment.

In addition to offering specific advice for debugging with each tool, authors Norm Matloff and Pete Salzman cover general strategies for improving the process of finding and fixing coding errors, including how to: Inspect variables and data structuresUnderstand segmentation faults and core dumpsKnow why your program crashes or throws exceptionsUse features like catchpoints, convenience variables, and artificial arraysAvoid common debugging pitfalls

Real world examples of coding errors help to clarify the authors' guiding principles, and coverage of complex topics like thread, client-server, GUI, and parallel programming debugging will make you even more proficient. You'll also learn how to prevent errors in the first place with text editors, compilers, error reporting, and static code checkers.

Whether you dread the thought of debugging your programs or simply want to improve your current debugging efforts, you'll find a valuable ally in The Art of Debugging.

Gordon McComb's Gadgeteers Goldmine

Gordon McComb

The Robot Builder's Bonanza: 99 Inexpensive Robotics Projects

Gordon McComb

Mystery of the Snow Pearls (Dungeons & Dragons Module CM5)

Anne Gray McCready

If..., Volume 1 : (Questions For The Game of Life) (Questions for the Game of Life)

JAMES SAYWELL EVELYN MCFARLANE

If..., Volume 2 : (500 New Questions for the Game of Life)

JAMES SAYWELL EVELYN MCFARLANE

Palm OS Programming: The Developer's Guide, 2nd Edition

Neil Rhodes Julie McKeehanWritten for the more experienced C/C++ developer moving to Palm development, Palm OS Programming, Second Editionsets an admirable standard as a programming tutorial that will let anyone get onboard with the best techniques and APIs used to build state-of-the-art Palm applications.

Few programming titles are as well written as this one. The authors consistently engage the reader with a tone that's smart and surprisingly personable given that this is a technical book. They first examine what is special about the Palm platform, including the best way to build user interfaces, plus dos and don'ts for new software. Early sections dissect real software (DateBk4 from Pimlico Software) with commentary from one of its inventors. After surveying the wide array of Palm development options (including CodeWarrior and the Palm OS Emulator, POSE), it's on to a simple Palm program.

While many programming texts use samples that grow in complexity, this title is anchored by a single case studya sales application. As the authors cover the basics of Palm development, from event handling basics, APIs for memory management, and form control programming, they provide the APIs you'll need to know. Then they show how their case study makes use of these features. (This approach is effective, though it assumes a bit of programming knowledge on the part of the reader.)

Standout sections here inspect what makes Palm development special, including memory management techniques, plus there's a fascinating look at automated testing tools (called Gremlins), which can find bugs by executing thousands of simulated user actions. Later sections delve into what it takes to create HotSync capabilities for your Palm applications. These modules, called Conduits, clearly present a programming challenge, and the coverage here will benefit developers of all levels of experience on the Palm platform.

The Palm platform has been a real success story, and Palm OS Programming: The Developer's Guidereveals why. It shows you how to think like a real Palm developer and gives you the specific APIs and programming techniques you need to know in order to write professional-quality Palm applications in C/C++. Richard Dragan

Palm Programming : The Developer's Guide

Neil Rhodes Julie McKeehanPalm Programming: The Developer's Guidesucceeds in documenting both the elegance and the pitfalls associated with developing software for this handy gadget. The authors are experienced palmtop developers, and their wisdom is evident in the level of detail provided. A comprehensive introduction to the evolution of the device and its systems opens the book, followed by a classic "hello, world" example program.

The complexity continues to increase as the reader is introduced to forms design and handling and Palm Databases interaction (the equivalent of the Windows registry). Rounding out the applications-development tutorials is an excellent discussion of event-driven user interface (UI) programming and the widgets available in the Palm toolbox.

A number of development options and platforms are covered. If you don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars for commercial software, GNU's Not Unix (GNU) tools from the Free Software Foundation are presented as a viable option. The discussion of conduit development is limited to Visual C++, but only because of the limitations of the official Conduit Developers Kit. Tim Kohn

Astronomical Algorithms

Jean Meeus

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House

Cheryl MendelsonThe classic bestselling resource for every American home. Choosing fabrics, cleaning china, keeping the piano in tune, making a good fire, folding a fitted sheet, setting the dining room table, keeping surfaces free of food pathogens, watering plants, removing stains  Home Comfortsaddresses the meanings as well as the methods of hands  on housekeeping to help you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to modern domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home.

Further topics include: Making up a bed with hospital corners, Expert recommendations for safe food storage, Reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), Keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, Home safety and security, A summary of laws applicable to the home, including privacy, accident liability, contracts, and domestic employees and more in this practical, good-humored, historic, philosophical, even romantic, guidebook to the art of household management.

Scan This Book - Vol. 1

John Mendenhall

Scan This Book Three

John Mendenhall

Scan This Book Two (Scan This Book)

John Mendenhall

Cavern of Doom: Zork No 3

S. Meretzky

Webster's Compact Rhyming Dictionary

Merriam-WebsterFor doggerel drafters and canto composers, a rhyming dictionary comes in very handy. If you prefer to work on your rhyme schemes while riding the bus or during your lunch hour, the compact version is perfect. It'll fit in a purse or jacket pocket, but still contains 50,000 words arranged by end rhyming sound. It's the reference of choice, lending poets new voice while their readers rejoice, saving poets heartache when their brains take a break.

CSS Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly))

Eric MeyerMore proof that good things come in smalland sometimes even inexpensivepackages: the CSS Pocket Referencehas been completely revised and updated to reflect the latest Cascading Style Sheet specifications, CSS2 and CSS2.1.

An indispensable reference for web designers and developers, this slim little book covers the essential information needed to effectively implement CSS, with an introduction to the key concepts of CSS and a complete alphabetical reference to the CSS2 and CSS 2.1 properties. And since browser incompatibility is the biggest CSS headache for most developers, it also includes an invaluable chart displaying detailed information about CSS support for every style element across all browsers. For anyone who wants to correctly implement CSS, this book condenses all the details in its companion volume, Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, into one easy-to-use cheat-sheet.

The CSS Pocket Referencedelivers just the CSS details that you need to complete the task at hand. When you're stuck and want an answer quickly, the tiny CSS Pocket Referenceis the book you'll want by your keyboard or in your back pocket. (Yes, it really does fit in a back pocket, but it's too useful to stay there long.)

Original Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community

Lorenzo Wilson Milam

Fantastic Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Edward J. Harshman Myron Miller

Intriguing Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Paul Sloane Des MacHale Myron Miller

The Adventures of Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey

Tony Millionaire

MCSE : The Core Exams in a Nutshell

Michael MoncurMCSE: The Core Exams in a Nutshellscores lots of points through its recognition of key facts about the "core four": there's lots of overlap among the exams. Rather than repeat the same information in multiple sections (or multiple volumes, as is becoming standard), Michael Moncur devotes a section of the book to what's unique in each exam, referring to other sections as needed.

Each portion of the book starts with an overview of the exam and a list of the chapters' objectives. The chapters conclude with a list of tasks to perform, a complete sample test, and a sort of condensed statement of key facts, suitable for last-minute cramming.

The author touches on all the topics that Microsoft mentions in its various Microsoft Certified Software Engineer (MCSE) exam specifications. However, readers should be warned that coverage in MCSE: The Core Exams in a Nutshellis less elementary than that of many other MCSE texts. You'll find hardly any step-by-step procedures, for one thing. If you're an experienced Windows NT hand and you have the ability to do a lot of experimenting with the procedures described, this book will be all you need. For anyone below an expert level, you may want to supplement this book with a text that wades through the exam material at a less breakneck pace.

RAM: Random Access Messages of the Computer Age

Monteleone Thomas F. Monteleone

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Alan Moore

Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!

Michael MooreStupid White Men, Michael Moore's screed against "Thief-in-Chief" George Bush's power elite, hit No. 1 at Amazon.com within days of publication. Why? It's as fulminating and crammed with infuriating facts as any right-wing bestseller, as irreverent as The Onion, and as noisily entertaining as a wrestling smackdown. Moore offers a more interesting critique of the 2000 election than Ralph Nader's Crashing the Party(he argued with Nader, his old boss, who sacked him), and he's serious when he advocates ousting Bush. But Moore's rage is outrageous, couched in shameless gags and madcap comedy: "Old white men wielding martinis and wearing dickies have occupied our nation's capital.... Launch the SCUD missiles! Bring us the head of Antonin Scalia!... We are no longer [able] to hold free and fair elections. We need U.N. observers, U.N. troops." Moore's ideas range from on-the-money (Arafat should beat Sharon with Gandhi's nonviolent shame tactics) to over-the-top: blacks should put inflatable white dolls in their cars so racist cops will think they're chauffeurs; the ever-more-Republicanesque Democratic Party should be sued for fraud;"no contributions toward advancing our civilization ever came out of the South [except Faulkner, Hellman, and R.J. Reynolds]," because it's too hot to think straight there; Korean dictator Kim Jong-il "has got to broaden himself beyond porn and John Wayne" by watching better movies, like Dude, Where's My Car?(which contains "all you need to know about America"). Whatever your politics, Stupid White Menshould make you blow your stack. Tim Appelo

Lights! Camera! Scream!: How to Make Your Own Monster Movies

Stephen Mooser

New American Crossword Puzzle Dictionary

Albert Morehead Loy Morehead

The Vrml Sourcebook

Andrea L. Ames David R. Nadeau John L. Moreland

Operation Red Jericho: The Guild Specialists Book 1 (The Guild of Specialists)

For Joshua Mowll, it was the surprise of a lifetime. There, among the archives inherited from his great-aunt Rebecca MacKenzie, was a 1920s journal recounting the thrilling and dangerous adventures of fifteen-year-old Rebecca and her younger brother, Doug, in the wake of their parents' mysterious disappearance in the deserts of China. Now carefully re-created in a lavish volume — complete with cloth binding and a journal-style elastic clasp — the siblings' tale begins aboard the Expedient, their uncle's enigmatic research ship, and moves at a breathless pace through the streets of Shanghai and on to a terrifying island fortress. Along the way, Doug and Becca encounter an ancient order of Chinese mercenaries, a brutal pirate warlord, a feisty Texan heiress, and a stolen cache of a volatile explosive called zoridium. By their saga's end, the intrepid duo has exposed a murderous plot involving their parents and uncovered a high-minded secret society hidden from the world for hundreds of years. Interspersed are such "archival" elements as:

— elaborate diagrams and maps

— vintage photos and illustrations

— documents with stamps, seals, and watermarks

— four full-color gatefolds, the largest a six-page foldout

— extensive appendices and notes

Painstakingly researched and packed with authentic detail, OPERATION RED JERICHO is the first of three nonstop-action tales of intrigue by first-time author Joshua Mowll — historical fiction at its finest.

Palm OS Programming from the Ground Up: The Accelerated Track for Professional Programmers

Robert MyklandThere's money to be made in developing applications for the Palm OS. As 3Com sells more of its devices, and licensees like Handspring add to the Palm OS universe, there's an ever-growing number of people who want to use their handheld computers to make their lives easier. By reading Palm OS Programming from the Ground Up, you can learn how to satisfy this market demand with quality software. Because author Robert Mykland is so liberal in sharing his ideas and exhibits such talent in communicating them effectively, you'll probably also enjoy the learning process.

Mykland takes care to explain every aspect of the programs he includes in this book, even going so far as to discuss what event-driven interfaces are and what the most elementary C statements do. Sometimes he includes really long code listings without much explanatory commentary in the immediate context, but you're usually able to figure out what he's doing by referring back to earlier sections. As you work through the explanations and exercises, you'll develop a solid understanding of how the Palm OS takes in, processes, and displays information. Experienced C developers won't find this book overly elementary, though, as Mykland digs fairly deep into the Palm OS's capabilities (including a considerable bit about its database format). A concluding section on tricks you can use to minimize bugs and speed the development process is particularly valuable. David Wall

Topics covered: Developing software for 3Com's Palm OS for handheld computers and means of collecting, storing, and manipulating data. Other topics have to do with designing attractive user interfaces, using Palm OS development tools (especially MetroWerks CodeWarrior 6), databases, and troubleshooting.

Windows NT File System Internals : A Developer's Guide

Rajeev NagarWriting kernel-mode Windows NT programssuch as file-system drivers (FSDs), filter drivers, and antivirus programsposes a challenge to even experienced Windows programmers. It's hard enough to get these programs to work, but getting them to live peacefully with other kernel programs and NT itself is an art. Nagar sorts through the mechanics of writing such programs in this book, which is no mean feat considering that Microsoft provides no documentation for its development kit. The author begins by orienting the reader to NT's kernel mode, detailing what runs there, how the various programs interact, and what you need to keep in mind when developing software for the kernel mode.

The book then explores NT's key managersI/O, virtual memory, and cachecovering the operation and exposed services for each. Nagar then takes the explanatory information he's provided and works it into a how-to guide to developing FSDs. In walking you through developing an actual FSD, the author covers I/O requests, cache operations, and buffers. Exercise files appear on the companion diskette.

Short of having a live instructor, you could not ask for a better guide to this complicated subject.

The Original Handbook for the Recently Deceased (Tech Manual-Field Operator's Edition)

Flann O'BrienA comic trip through hell in Ireland, as told by a murderer, The Third Policemanis another inspired bit of confusing and comic lunacy from the warped imagination and lovably demented pen of Flann O'Brien, author of At Swim-Two-Birds. There's even a small chance you'll figure out what's going on if you read the publisher's note that appears on the last page.

Jake OlefskyIf you're looking for fun ways to challenge yourself for hours, The Everything Brain Strain Bookis for you! Over 400 puzzles, riddles, brain teasers, and more will test your IQ and improve your thinking and problem-solving skills. Organized by difficulty and type, this all-inclusive game book will keep you guessing.

Including:

Language puzzles

Letter equations

Logic puzzles

Math and science teasers

Probability puzzles

Rebuses

Riddles

Trivia

Give up? A Solution Guide in the back of the book is there for you when you've encountered the toughest puzzles of all. Indulge your penchant for puzzles as you face challenge after challenge in The Everything Brain Strain Book.

Mindhunter : Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

John E. Douglas Mark Olshaker

Isle of Dread X1

Tsr Op

A Dictionary of Superstitions

Iona Archibald Opie Moira Tatem Iona Opie

1984

George Orwell

Code Breaking: A History and Exploration

Rudolf Kippenhahn Ewald Osers

Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk

Fugitives and Refugees : A Walk in Portland, Oregon (Crown Journeys)

CHUCK PALAHNIUKIt's rare to find a travel guide and a memoir joined neatly together in a single, highly readable 176-page volume. But Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby) is a writer of rare talent and his home of Portland, Oregon, is a city of rare wonders. In Strangers and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, Palahniuk goes beyond the AAA handbooks to reveal the places, people, and legends of Portland that have long been known only to locals. The reader learns the location of the legendary Self Cleaning House, where to find the restless ghost of the founder of Powell's Books, and why feral cats are such an important part of Portland baseball. Portland, it seems, is also a highly sexual city and Palahniuk dutifully dissects the specialties of each strip joint as well as discussing Mochika, a zoo penguin with a real fetish for black boots. Along the way, he includes "postcards" from his life in the Rose City dating back to 1981 when, as a 19-year-old, he dropped acid and accidentally ate part of a woman's fur coat during a laser show of Pink Floyd's The Wall. As Palahniuk matures, the postcards reveal the author becoming increasingly a part of the city's scene, culminating with a wild and wooly Millennium Eve celebration at the Bagdad Theater that featured a screening of the film version of Fight Club. Fugitives and Refugeesis a must for anyone who may, in their lives, go to Portland. But its appeal should reach beyond Oregonians. Palahniuk's love of the city is so great, and his stories so weirdly wonderful, it makes one want to get out of the house, get in the car, and drive to Portland right away. Just remember to pack the book. John Moe

Invisible Monsters

Chuck PalahniukWhen the plot of your first novel partially hinges on anarchist overthrows funded by soap sales, and the narrative hook of your second work is the black box recorder of a jet moments away from slamming into the Australian outback, it stands to reason that your audience is going to be ready for anything. Which, to an author like Chuck Palahniuk, must sound like a challenge. Palahniuk's third identity crisis (that's "novel" to you), Invisible Monsters, more than ably responds to this call to arms. Set once again in an all-too-familiar modern wasteland where social disease and self-hatred can do more damage than any potboiler-fiction bad guy, the tale focuses particularly on a group of drag queens and fashion models trekking cross-country to find themselves, looking everywhere from the bottom of a vial of Demerol to the end of a shotgun barrel. It's a sort of Drugstore Cowboy-meets-Yentlaffair, or a Hope-Crosby road movie with a skin graft and hormone-pill obsession, if you know what I mean.

Um, yeah. Anyway, the Hollywood vibe doesn't stop these comparisons. As with Fight Cluband Survivor, the book is invested with a cinematic sweep, from the opening set piece, which takes off like a house afire (literally), to a host of filmic tics sprayed throughout the text: "Flash,""Jump back,""Jump way ahead,""Flash,""Flash,""Flash." You get the idea. It's as if Palahniuk didn't write the thing but yanked it directly out of the Cineplex of his mind's eye. Does it succeed? Mostly. Still working on measuring out the proper dosages of his many writerly talents (equal parts potent imagery, nihilistic coolspeak, and doped-out craziness), Palahniuk every now and then loosens his grip on the story line, which at points becomes as hard to decipher as your local pill addict's medicine cabinet. However Invisible Monstersworks best on a roller-coaster level. You don't stop and count each slot on the track as you're going down the big hill. You throw up your hands and yell, "Whee!"Bob Michaels

Stranger Than Fiction : True Stories

CHUCK PALAHNIUK

Survivor : A Novel

CHUCK PALAHNIUK

Does the Center Hold?: An Introduction to Western Philosophy

Donald Palmer

Great Curries of India

Camellia Panjabi

How to Read a French Fry

Russ ParsonsWhy can you stick your hand into a 450-degree oven but not into 212-degree boiling water without burning it? Why does fish taste different from meat? Why do you cook pork differently from beef? Why should you always start cooking dried beans in cold water, not warm? Why should you never cook a Vidalia onion?

What's the only kind of marinade that's really an effective tenderizer? Why is strawberry-rhubarb a good combination, scientifically speaking? And why don't potatoes fried in fresh oil ever brown completely, no matter how long they're cooked?

"Cooking is full of questions that science can help you answer, questions that can make you a better cook," writes the award-winning Los Angeles Times food editor, Russ Parsons.

In this entertaining book packed with fascinating tidbits, Parsons explores the science behind such basic cooking methods as chopping, mixing, frying, roasting, boiling, and baking. You'll learn why soaking beans can't offset their gaseous effects, why green vegetables shouldn't be cooked under a lid for long, which fruits you can buy unripe and which you should buy fully ripened, which thickener to choose for your turkey gravy, which piecrust is foolproof for a beginner.

Along the way, Parsons slips in hundreds of cooking tips, provocative trivia, and touches of wit that make his scientific explanations go down smoothly. He also includes more than a hundred recipes that deliciously exemplify the principles he describes, from Tuscan Potato Chips and Crisp-Skinned Salmon on Creamy Leeks and Cabbage to Chocolate Pots de Creme and Ultimate Strawberry Shortcake.

New Kitchen Garden (DK Living)

Anna Pavord

XSL FO

Dave Pawson

UML Toolkit (OMG)

Hans-Erik Eriksson Magnus PenkerThe Unified Modeling Language (UML) promises to make object-oriented modeling a lot more accessible for software developers. UML brings together popular modeling languages by the so-called "three amigos" (Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobson) under an open standard and UML Toolkitcan help you use it for your next software development project.

The authors detail the dozen or so diagrams available in UML, which feature use-case modeling, class diagrams, dynamic models (including state diagrams), and physical models (which outline the components inside your system and how they will be deployed). They also discuss extensions to UML (through "stereotypes") and document how well UML is actually implemented in today's computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools. The book includes sample implementations of modeling diagrams, written in Java, for most chapters, and the accompanying CD-ROM contains a trial version of the CASE tool Rational Rose.

In addition to outlining the essentials of modeling techniques, the authors do a good job of placing UML in context with other models. They provide a short tour of the software engineering process and tell users who are familiar with the Booch and Rational Objectory methods how to move over to UML. This section compares the diagramming symbols used in each method and discusses patternsa hot topic in object-oriented designand how they can be modeled using UML.

The book closes with a useful (though brief) case study of a computer system for a small library, which gives the reader a flavor of how to use UML in the field. With enough depth for the expert and enough simplicity for the novice, UML Toolkitserves as a fine one-volume introduction to the brave new world of UML.

The Mathematics of Nonlinear Programming (Undergraduate Text in Mathematics)

Anthony L. Peressini

STAMP 2 Communications and Control Projects

Thomas PetruzzellisWhen it comes to adding power to complex electronic circuits, the BASIC STAMP II microprocessor is the standard against which all others are judged. And now, thanks to STAMP II Communications and Control Projects, learning how to integrate this versatile technology with your next project is easier than ever.

Linux Appliance Design: A Hands-On Guide to Building Linux Appliances

Bob Smith John Hardin Graham Phillips Bill PierceLinux appliances are computers that serve a single, well-defined purpose. Modern appliances are complex machines, with processors, operating systems, and application software. For example, the Tivo is essentially a Linux-based computer with a single purpose: recording television. While there are books that tell readers how to run Linux on embedded hardware and books on how to build a Linux application, Linux Appliance Designis the first book to demonstrate how to merge the two to create a Linux appliance. Programmers will learn how to build backend daemons, handle asynchronous events, and connect various user interfaces (including web, framebuffers, infared control, SNMP, and front panels) to these processes for remote configuration and control. Linux Appliance Design also introduces the Runtime Access Protocol, which provides a uniform mechanism for user interfaces to communicate with daemons. The accompanying CD includes a prototype appliance - a home alarm system - that supports the book's lessons. The prototype is written using a liberal BSD style license, which allows readers to use and modify the code used in the prototype.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

ROBERT PIRSIG

Complete Tales and Poems

Edgar Allan Poe

Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

David Pogue

Mac OS X Hints

Rob Griffiths David Pogue

Cold Target (Berkley Sensation)

Patricia Potter

Big Secrets

William Poundstone

Biggest Secrets: More Uncensored Truth About All Sorts of Stuff You Are Never Supposed to Know

William Poundstone

How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers

William PoundstoneMicrosoft's interview process is a notoriously grueling sequence of brain-busting questions that separate the most creative thinkers from the merely brilliant. So effective is their technique that other leading corporationsfrom the high-tech industry to consulting and financial servicesare modeling their own hiring practices on Bill Gates' unique approach. HOW WOULD YOU MOVE MOUNT FUJI? reveals for the first time more than 35 of Microsoft's puzzles and riddles.

The Science of Self-Realization

A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

Sri Isopanisad: The Knowledge That Brings One Nearer to the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krsna

A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

Digital Electronics Demystified (Demystified)

Myke PredkoThe field of teaching digital electronics has not changed significantly in the past 20 years. Many of the same books that first became available in the late 1970s and early 1980s are still being used as basic texts. In the 20+ years since these were written, the basic rules have not changed, but they do not provide strong links to modern electronics including CMOS logic, Programmable Logic Devices and microprocessor/microcontroller interfacing. Courses teaching introductory digital electronics will fill in the missing areas of information for students, but neither the instructors nor students have resources to explain modern technology and interfaces. One assumption made by all the standard texts is that experimenting with digital electronics cannot be done easily - in the proposed book, “digital guru” Myke Predko will show how readers can set up their own apparatus for experimenting with digital electronics for less than $10.

The Prestige

Christopher PriestThe Washington Postcalled this "a dizzying magic show of a novel, chock-a-block with all the props of Victorian sensation fiction: seances, multiple narrators, a family curse, doubles, a lost notebook, wraiths, and disembodied spirits; a haunted house, awesome mad-doctor machinery, a mausoleum, and ghoulish horrors; a misunderstood scientist, impossible disappearances; the sins of the fathers visited upon their descendants." Winner of the 1996 World Fantasy Award, The Prestigeis even better than that, because unlike many Victorians, Priest writes crisp, unencumbered prose. And anyone who's ever thrilled to the arcing electricity in the "It's alive!" scene in Frankenstein will relish the "special effects" by none other than Nikola Tesla.

The Golden Compass

Philip PullmanSome books improve with agethe age of the reader, that is. Such is certainly the case with Philip Pullman's heroic, at times heart-wrenching novel, The Golden Compass, a story ostensibly for children but one perhaps even better appreciated by adults. The protagonist of this complex fantasy is young Lyra Belacqua, a precocious orphan growing up within the precincts of Oxford University. But it quickly becomes clear that Lyra's Oxford is not precisely like our ownnor is her world. For one thing, people there each have a personal dæmon, the manifestation of their soul in animal form. For another, hers is a universe in which science, theology, and magic are closely allied:

As for what experimental theology was, Lyra had no more idea than the urchins. She had formed the notion that it was concerned with magic, with the movements of the stars and planets, with tiny particles of matter, but that was guesswork, really. Probably the stars had dæmons just as humans did, and experimental theology involved talking to them.

Not that Lyra spends much time worrying about it; what she likes best is "clambering over the College roofs with Roger the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war." But Lyra's carefree existence changes forever when she and her dæmon, Pantalaimon, first prevent an assassination attempt against her uncle, the powerful Lord Asriel, and then overhear a secret discussion about a mysterious entity known as Dust. Soon she and Pan are swept up in a dangerous game involving disappearing children, a beautiful woman with a golden monkey dæmon, a trip to the far north, and a set of allies ranging from "gyptians" to witches to an armor-clad polar bear.

In The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman has written a masterpiece that transcends genre. It is a children's book that will appeal to adults, a fantasy novel that will charm even the most hardened realist. Best of all, the author doesn't speak down to his audience, nor does he pull his punches; there is genuine terror in this book, and heartbreak, betrayal, and loss. There is also love, loyalty, and an abiding morality that infuses the story but never overwhelms it. This is one of those rare novels that one wishes would never end. Fortunately, its sequel, The Subtle Knife, will help put off that inevitability for a while longer. Alix Wilber

The Food of India: Authentic Recipes from the Spicy Subcontinent (Periplus World Cookbooks)

Karen Anand Jennifer Brennan Wendy Hutton Oberoi Group Jasjit Purewal

The Dell Crossword Dictionary / Compiled

Kathleen Rafferty

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

Lathan's Gold (Dungeons & Dragons Module XSOLO)

Merle Rasmussen

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai : Across the Eighth Dimension

Earl Mac Rauch

ARM System Developer's Guide : Designing and Optimizing System Software

Andrew N. Sloss Dominic Symes Chris Wright John Rayfield

Return to the Chateau

PAULINE REAGE

Using X: Troubleshooting the X Window System, Motif and Open Look

Eric F. Johnson Kevin Reichard

Werewolf: The Apocalypse

Mark Reinhagen

Interview with the Vampire

ANNE RICEIn the now-classic novel Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice refreshed the archetypal vampire myth for a late-20th-century audience. The story is ostensibly a simple one: having suffered a tremendous personal loss, an 18th-century Louisiana plantation owner named Louis Pointe du Lac descends into an alcoholic stupor. At his emotional nadir, he is confronted by Lestat, a charismatic and powerful vampire who chooses Louis to be his fledgling. The two prey on innocents, give their "dark gift" to a young girl, and seek out others of their kind (notably the ancient vampire Armand) in Paris. But a summary of this story bypasses the central attractions of the novel. First and foremost, the method Rice chose to tell her talewith Louis' first-person confession to a skeptical boytransformed the vampire from a hideous predator into a highly sympathetic, seductive, and all-too-human figure. Second, by entering the experience of an immortal character, one raised with a deep Catholic faith, Rice was able to explore profound philosophical concernsthe nature of evil, the reality of death, and the limits of human perceptionin ways not possible from the perspective of a more finite narrator.

While Rice has continued to investigate history, faith, and philosophy in subsequent Vampire novels (including The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief, Memnoch the Devil, and The Vampire Armand), Interviewremains a treasured masterpiece. It is that rare work that blends a childlike fascination for the supernatural with a profound vision of the human condition. Patrick O'Kelley

Aspca Complete Guide to Cats

James R. RichardsFor many, the search for a comprehensive cat-care book often leads to frustration, finding only specific topics addressed in each bookfrom a care primer here to a breed book there. Now, from the ASPCA, comes the Complete Guide to Cats, covering everything that a cat owner needs to know about choosing and caring for a kitty. Beginning in section 1 with the basics of how to bring a cat into your life (choosing your new pet, preparing your home for the new arrival), section 2 goes on to offer detailed information on cat breeds and how to decide which breed is the right one for you. Section 3 covers a brief history of the domestic feline, how the cat works (framework of bones and muscles, the organs, digestive and urinary systems, reproductive system), and understanding your cat. The final section of the guide is devoted to taking care of your cat, including keeping your kitty healthy and common feline health problems, home nursing, first aid, and special care, such as mating, pregnancy, and birth, as well as the older years. With a multitude of color photographs and illustrations sprinkled throughout the clear and concise textnot to mention the added value of appendices that offer a host of helpful information including important telephone numbers and a glossary of cat-related termsthe ASPCA Complete Guide to Catsis a must-have for the owner that wants the best for their feline friend.

Frida's Fiestas : Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo

Marie Pierre Colle Guadalupe RiveraIn the tradition of the best-selling Monet's Table, Frida's Fiestasis a personal account in words and pictures of many important and happy events in the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and a scrapbook, assembled by her stepdaughter, of recipes for more than 100 dishes that Frida served to family and friends with her characteristic enthusiasm for all the pleasures of life.Full-color photographs.

VI Editor Pocket Reference

Arnold Robbins

sed & awk (2nd Edition)

Dale Dougherty Arnold Robbins

Writing Themes About Literature

Edgar V. Roberts

By Any Other Name

Spider Robinson

The Callahan Chronicals

Spider RobinsonThis omnibus edition collects Spider Robinson's first three books about the Long Island bar that attracts the weirdest clientele and the tallest tales in the known universe. Callahan's Crosstime Saloon,Time Travelers Strictly Cash,and Callahan's Secretare playful, pun-filled delights from the pen of a truly inimitable writer, winner of the Skylark and John W. Campbell awards.

The Callahan Touch

Spider Robinson

Callahan's Con

Spider Robinson

Callahan's Key

SPIDER ROBINSON

Callahan's Lady

Spider Robinson

Callahan's Legacy (Callahan's Crosstime Saloon)

Spider Robinson

The Free Lunch

Spider Robinson

Lady Slings the Booze

Spider Robinson

Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night

Nicholas Rogers

Inside COM (Programming Series)

Dale RogersonCOM (Component Object Model) forms the foundation of OLE and ActiveX as well as Microsoft's vision for componentized, distributed computing. Inside COMexplains COM from the ground up, beginning with a lucid overview of what COM is and what benefits it offers programmers, then delving into the details of its actual operation. While Rogerson provides code samples in C++, the book isn't about C++ nor is it overwhelmed with program listings. Rogerson masterfully starts with a high-level view that doesn't get swamped in unnecessary detail then later fills in the gaps and addresses advanced topics. He offers just the right approach for programmers who might be intimidated by COM's apparent complexity.

Extreme Paranoia: Nobody Knows the Trouble I'Ve Shot!

Ken Rolston

The 1997 Joy of Cooking

Marion Rombauer Becker Ethan Becker Irma S. RombauerSince its original publication, Joy of Cooking has been the most authoritative cookbook in America? the one upon which millions of cooks have confidently relied for more than sixty-five years. It's the book your grandmother and mother probably learned to cook from, the book you gave your sister when she got married. This, the first revision in more than twenty years, is better than ever. Here's why: Every chapter has been rethought with an emphasis on freshness, convenience, and health.All the recipes have been reconceived and tested with an eye to modern taste, and the cooking knowledge imparted with each subject enriched to the point where everyone from a beginning to an experienced cook will feel completely supported.The new Joy continues the vision of American cooking that began with the first edition of Joy. It is still the book you can turn to for perfect Beef Wellington and Baked Macaroni and Cheese. It's also the book where you can now find Turkey on the Grill, Spicy Peanut Sesame Noodles, and vegetarian meals.The new Joy provides more thorough descriptions of ingredients, from the familiar to the most exotic. For instance, almost all the varieties of apples grown domestically are described  the months they become available, how they taste, what they are best used for, and how long they keep. But for the first time Joy features a complete section on fresh and dried chili peppers: how to roast and grill them, how to store them, and how long they keep  with illustrations of each pepper.An all-new "RULES" section in many chapters gives essential cooking basics at a glance: washing and storing salad greens, selecting a pasta and a matching sauce, determining when a piece of fish is cooked through, stuffing a chicken, and making a perfect souffle.New chapters reflect changing American tastes and lifestyles:Separate new chapters on grains, beans, and pasta include recipes for grits, polenta, pilafs, risottos, vegetarian chills, bean casseroles, and make-ahead lasagnes.New baking and dessert chapters promise to enhance Joy of Cooking's reputation as a bible for bakers. Quick and yeast bread recipes range from focaccia, pizza, and sourdoughs to muffins and coffee cakes. Separate chapters cover custards and puddings, pies and tarts, cookies, cakes, cobblers, and other American fruit desserts revived for this edition. Recipes include one-bowl cakes, gingerbread, angel and sponge cakes, meringues, pound cakes, fruitcakes, 6 different kinds of cheesecake  there's even an illustrated wedding cake recipe, which takes you through all the stages from building a stand, making and decorating the cake, to transporting it to the reception without a hitch.Little Dishes showcases foods from around the world: hummus, baba ghanoush, bruschetta, tacos, empanadas, and fried wontons.AII new drawings of techniques, ingredients, and equipment, integrated throughout an elegant new design, and over 300 more pages round out the new Joy.

Among this book's other unique features: microwave instructions for preparing beans, grains, and vegetables; dozens of new recipes for people who are lactose intolerant and allergic to gluten; expanded ingredients chart now features calories, essential vitamins, and levels of fats and cholesterol. There are ideas for substitutions to lower fat in recipes and reduced-fat recipes in the baking sections.

From cover to cover, Joy's chapters have been imbued with the knowledge and passion of America's greatest cooks and cooking teachers. An invaluable combination of old and new, this edition of Joy of Cooking promises to keep you cooking for years to come.

Learning the Korn Shell

Bill Rosenblatt

Silicon Mirage: The Art and Science of Virtual Reality

Steve Aukstakalnis David Blatner Stephen F. Roth

Mac OS X for Unix Geeks

Brian Jepson Ernest E. RothmanIt's about time: Mac OS X for Unix Geeksarrives on the scene none too soon for UNIX aficionados who, having heard that the latest editions of Mac OS are based on a UNIX variant, want to see how the platform compares to more venerable versions of the eminently configurable operating system. This book highlights some key differences between the Darwin environment and more conventional UNIXs, enabling people with UNIX experience to take advantage of it as they learn the Mac OS X way of doing things at the command line.

This skinny volume neither aims to teach its readers UNIX nor introduce them to the Mac, but rather to show how Apple has implemented UNIX. It's a fast read that assumesas the title impliesrather a lot of UNIX knowledge. With that requirement satisfied and this book in hand, you're likely to discover aspects of Aqua more quickly than you otherwise would have.

The authors spend lots of time explaining how administrative taskssuch as managing groups, users, and passwordsare handled in the Mac OS environment. They document netinfofully, and call attention to its limitations (like its inability to create home directories for users) by explaining how to do the job on the command line. They also cover C programming in the Darwin universe at greater length than any other book does, providing explicit instructions for such important tasks as creating header files and linking static libraries. A guide to the command line (they call the reference sectiongroan"The Missing Manpages") provides good value at this book's conclusion. David Wall

Topics covered:How to get around in Darwin, the UNIX implementation built into Mac OS X. Sections deal with basic maneuvering at the command line, LDAP services, C programming, and graphical user interfaces under Aqua. There's a short section on building the kernel itself, but it's limited in scope.

Bruce SchneierCryptographic techniques have applications far beyond the obvious uses of encoding and decoding information. For Internet developers who need to know about capabilities, such as digital signatures, that depend on cryptographic techniques, there's no better overview than Applied Cryptography, the definitive book on the subject. Bruce Schneier covers general classes of cryptographic protocols and then specific techniques, detailing the inner workings of real-world cryptographic algorithms including the Data Encryption Standard and RSA public-key cryptosystems. The book includes source-code listings and extensive advice on the practical aspects of cryptography implementation, such as the importance of generating truly random numbers and of keeping keys secure.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World

Bruce SchneierWhom can you trust? Try Bruce Schneier, whose rare gift for common sense makes his book Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked Worldboth enlightening and practical. He's worked in cryptography and electronic security for years, and has reached the depressing conclusion that even the loveliest code and toughest hardware still will yield to attackers who exploit human weaknesses in the users. The book is neatly divided into three parts, covering the turn-of-the-century landscape of systems and threats, the technologies used to protect and intercept data, and strategies for proper implementation of security systems. Moving away from blind faith in prevention, Schneier advocates swift detection and response to an attack, while maintaining firewalls and other gateways to keep out the amateurs.

Newcomers to the world of Schneier will be surprised at how funny he can be, especially given a subject commonly perceived as quiet and dull. Whether he's analyzing the security issues of the rebels and the Death Star in Star Warsor poking fun at the giant software and e-commerce companies that consistently sacrifice security for sexier features, he's one of the few tech writers who can provoke laughter consistently. While moderately pessimistic on the future of systems vulnerability, he goes on to relieve the reader's tension by comparing our electronic world to the equally insecure paper world we've endured for centuriesa little smart-card fraud doesn't seem so bad after all. Despite his unfortunate (but brief) shill for his consulting company in the book's afterword, you can trust Schneier to dish the dirt in Secrets and Lies. Rob Lightner

Learning Perl (A Nutshell handbook)

Randal L. SchwartzIn this smooth, carefully paced course, a leading Perl trainer teaches you to program in the language that threatens to make C, sed, awk, and the Unix shell obsolete for many tasks. This book is the "official" guide for both formal (classroom) and informal learning. It is fully accessible to the novice programmer.

Admit it. You always thought eloping sounded kind of romantic, right? Too bad everyone expects you to have The Big Wedding  the kind you always thought you wanted. So now that you're engaged and knee-deep in wedding planning, why are you secretly wishing you could just fly off to a tropical island and say your I do's in your bathing suit?

Well, you can! There are many different ways to elope  and not all of them involve running off in the middle of the night. These days, "eloping" is anything other than a traditional wedding  from a steps-of-city-hall ceremony with just the two of you, to a fun-filled "destination wedding" with your family and closest friends.

Let's Elopeis filled with creative ideas for exchanging your vows in a memorable, personalized way that won't necessarily cost you a fortune  or your sanity. Let's Elopeincludes:

*A brief history of weddings  and why people first began to elope

*A quiz to help you decide if eloping is right for you

*Inspiring anecdotes from real-life couples who chose to opt out of a traditional wedding

*Elopement etiquette, including how to break the news to your family and friends

*Information on how to plan destination weddings, country weekend weddings, and surprise weddings

*Up-to-the-minute addresses, phone numbers, and Web sites for the world's top elopement spots

*Tons of ideas about what to do with all the money you saved!

How to Rock Climb: Better Bouldering (How To Climb Series)

John Sherman

The Necronomicon

Simon

The Code Book : The Evolution Of Secrecy From Mary, To Queen Of Scots To Quantum Crytography

SIMON SINGHPeople love secrets, and ever since the first word was written, humans have written coded messages to each other. In The Code Book, Simon Singh, author of the bestselling Fermat's Enigma, offers a peek into the world of cryptography and codes, from ancient texts through computer encryption. Singh's compelling history is woven through with stories of how codes and ciphers have played a vital role in warfare, politics, and royal intrigue. The major theme of The Code Bookis what Singh calls "the ongoing evolutionary battle between codemakers and codebreakers," never more clear than in the chapters devoted to World War II. Cryptography came of age during that conflict, as secret communications became critical to either side's success.

Confronted with the prospect of defeat, the Allied cryptanalysts had worked night and day to penetrate German ciphers. It would appear that fear was the main driving force, and that adversity is one of the foundations of successful codebreaking.

In the information age, the fear that drives cryptographic improvements is both capitalistic and libertariancorporations need encryption to ensure that their secrets don't fall into the hands of competitors and regulators, and ordinary people need encryption to keep their everyday communications private in a free society. Similarly, the battles for greater decryptionpower come from said competitors and governments wary of insurrection. The Code Bookis an excellent primer for those wishing to understand how the human need for privacy has manifested itself through cryptography. Singh's accessible style and clear explanations of complex algorithms cut through the arcane mathematical details without oversimplifying. Can't get enough crypto? Try solving the Cipher Challenge in the back of the book$15,000 goes to the first person to crack the code! Therese Littleton

Network Programming in Windows NT

Alok K. Sinha

DVD Studio Pro 2 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickPro Guide

Martin Sitter

The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero

William Kalush Larry SlomanHandcuff King. Escape Artist. International Superstar. Since his death eighty years ago, Harry Houdini's life has been chronicled in books, in film, and on television. Now, in this groundbreaking biography, renowned magic expert William Kalush and bestselling writer Larry Sloman team up to find the man behind the myth. Drawing from millions of pages of research, they describe in vivid detail the passions that drove Houdini to perform ever-more-dangerous feats, his secret life as a spy, and a pernicious plot to subvert his legacy.

The Secret Life of Houdinitraces the arc of the master magician's life from desperate poverty to worldwide fame  his legacy later threatened by a group of fanatical Spiritualists led by esteemed British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Initiating the reader along the way into the arcane world of professional magic, Kalush and Sloman decode a life based on deception, providing an intimate and riveting portrayal of Houdini, the man and the legend.

Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of Physics for Engineering and Science (Schaum's outline series)

Dare A. Wells Harold S. Slusher

The Vegetable Gardener's Bible: Discover Ed's High-Yield W-O-R-D System for All North American Gardening Regions

Edward C. SmithWouldn't it be lovely to have a patch of corn, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and beans just steps from your kitchen door? Would you like to learn how to control your zucchini plant? Ed Smith, an experienced vegetable gardener from Vermont, has put together this amazingly comprehensive and commonsensical manual, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible. Basically, Ed and his family have been growing a wide variety of vegetables for years and he's figured out what works. This book, filled with step-by-step info and color photos, breaks it all down for you.

Ed's system is based on W-O-R-D: Wide rows, Organic methods, Raised beds, Deep soil. With deep, raised beds, vegetable roots have more room to grow and expand. In traditional narrow-row beds, over half the soil is compacted into walkways while a garden with wide, deep, raised beds, plants get to use most of the soil. In Ed's plan, growing space gets about three-quarters of the garden plot and only about a quarter is used for the walkway. Ed teaches you how to create raised beds both in a larger garden or in separate planked beds. One of the most importantand most often overlookedaspects of successful vegetable gardening is crop rotation. Leaving a crop in the same place for years can deplete nutrients in that area and makes the crop more likely to be attacked by insects. Rotate at least every two years and your vegetables will be healthier and bug-free. There's also a good section on insect and blight control.

Before choosing what to grow, go through the last third of the book, where Ed takes a look at the individual growing, harvesting, and best varieties of a large number of both common and more exotic vegetables and herbs. Whether you are a putterer or a serious gardener, The Vegetable Gardener's Bibleis an excellent resource to have handy. Dana Van Nest

Logic Puzzles to Bend Your Brain

Kurt Smith

iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

Steve Wozniak Gina SmithThe mastermind behind Apple sheds his low profile and steps forward to tell his story for the first time.

Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen? The result was the first true personal computer, the Apple I, a widely affordable machine that anyone could understand and figure out how to use.

Wozniak's life—before and after Apple—is a "home-brew" mix of brilliant discovery and adventure, as an engineer, a concert promoter, a fifth-grade teacher, a philanthropist, and an irrepressible prankster. From the invention of the first personal computer to the rise of Apple as an industry giant, iWozpresents a no-holds-barred, rollicking, firsthand account of the humanist inventor who ignited the computer revolution. 16 pages of illustrations.

The Bad Beginning

Lemony SnicketMake no mistake. The Bad Beginningbegins badly for the three Baudelaire children, and then gets worse. Their misfortunes begin one gray day on Briny Beach when Mr. Poe tells them that their parents perished in a fire that destroyed their whole house. "It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed," laments the personable (occasionally pedantic) narrator, who tells the story as if his readers are gathered around an armchair on pillows. But of course what follows is dreadful. The children thought it was bad when the well-meaning Poes bought them grotesque-colored clothing that itched. But when they are ushered to the dilapidated doorstep of the miserable, thin, unshaven, shiny-eyed, money-grubbing Count Olaf, they know that theyand their family fortuneare in real trouble. Still, they could never have anticipated how much trouble. While it's true that the events that unfold in Lemony Snicket's novels are bleak, and things never turn out as you'd hope, these delightful, funny, linguistically playful books are reminiscent of Roald Dahl (remember James and the Giant Peachand his horrid spinster aunts), Charles Dickens (the orphaned Pip in Great Expectationswithout the mysterious benefactor), and Edward Gorey (The Gashlycrumb Tinies). There is no question that young readers will want to read the continuing unlucky adventures of the Baudelaire children in The Reptile Roomand The Wide Window. (Ages 9 and older) Karin Snelson

The Reptile Room

Lemony SnicketThe Reptile Roombegins where Lemony Snicket's The Bad Beginningends... on the road with the three orphaned Baudelaire children as they are whisked away from the evil Count Olaf to face "an unknown fate with some unknown relative." But who is this Dr. Montgomery, their late father's cousin's wife's brother? "Would Dr. Montgomery be a kind person?they wondered. Would he at least be better than Count Olaf? Could he possibly be worse?"He certainly is not worse, and in fact when the Baudelaire children discover that he makes coconut cream cakes, circles the globe looking for snakes to study, and even plans to take them with him on his scientific expedition to Peru, the kids can't believe their luck. And, if you have read the first book in this Series of Unfortunate Events, you won't believe their luck either. Despite the misadventures that befall these interesting, intelligent, resourceful orphans, you can trust that the engaging narrator will make their storysuspenseful and alarming as it isa true delight. The Wide Windowis next, and more are on their way. (Ages 9 and older) Karin Snelson

The Wide Window

Lemony SnicketIn The Bad Beginning, things, well, begin badly for the three Baudelaire orphans. And sadly, events only worsen in The Reptile Room. In the third in Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, there is still no hope on the horizon for these poor children. Their adventures are exciting and memorable, but, as the author points out, "exciting and memorable like being chased by a werewolf through a field of thorny bushes at midnight with nobody around to help you."

This story begins when the orphans are being escorted by the well-meaning Mr. Poe to yet another distant relative who has agreed to take them in since their parents were killed in a horrible fire. Aunt Josephine, their new guardian, is their second cousin's sister-in-law, and she is afraid of everything. Her house (perched precariously on a cliff above Lake Lachrymose) is freezing because she is afraid of the radiator exploding, she eats cold cucumber soup because she's afraid of the stove, and she doesn't answer the telephone due to potential electrocution dangers. Her greatest joy in life is grammar, however, and when it comes to the proper use of the English language, she is fearless.

But just when she should be the most fearfulwhen Count Olaf creeps his way back to find the Baudelaire orphans and steal their fortuneshe somehow lets her guard down. Once again, it is up to Violet, Klaus, and Sunny to get themselves out of danger. Will they succeed? We haven't the stomach to tell you. (Ages 9 to 12) Karin Snelson

The Miserable Mill

Lemony Snicket"The Baudelaire orphans looked out the grimy window of the train and gazed at the gloomy blackness of the Finite Forest, wondering if their lives would ever get better," begins The Miserable Mill. If you have been introduced to the three Baudelaire orphans in any of Lemony Snicket's previous novels, you know that not only will their lives not get better, they will get much worse. In the fourth installment in the "Series of Unfortunate Events," the sorrowful siblings, having once again narrowly escaped the clutches of the evil Count Olaf, are escorted by the kindly but ineffectual Mr. Poe to their newest "home" at the Lucky Smells Lumbermill. Much to their horror (if not surprise), their dormitory at the mill is crowded and damp, they are forced to work with spinning saw blades, they are fed only one meal a day (not counting the chewing gum they get for lunch), and worst of all, Count Olaf lurks in a dreadful disguise as Shirley the receptionist just down the street. Not even the clever wordplay and ludicrous plot twists could keep this story buoyantreading about the mean-spirited foreman, the deadly blades, poor Klaus (hypnotized and "reprogrammed"), and the relentless hopelessness of the children's situation only made us feel gloomy. Fans of these wickedly funny, suspenseful adventures won't want to miss out on a single one, but we're hoping the next tales have the delicate balance of delight and disaster we've come to expect from this exciting series. (Ages 9 to 12)

The Austere Academy

Lemony SnicketAs the three Baudelaire orphans warily approach their new homePrufrock Preparatory Schoolthey can't help but notice the enormous stone arch bearing the school's motto Memento Mori, or "Remember you will die." This is not a cheerful greeting, and certainly marks an inauspicious beginning to a very bleak story. Of course, this is what we have come to expect from Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, the deliciously morbid set of books that began with The Bad Beginningand only got worse.

In The Austere Academy, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are at first optimisticattending school is a welcome change for the book-loving trio, and the academy is allegedly safe from the dreaded Count Olaf, who is after their fortune. Hope dissipates quickly, however, when they meet Vice Principal Nero, a self-professed genius violinist who sneeringly imitates their every word. More dreadful still, he houses them in the tin Orphans Shack, crawling with toe-biting crabs and dripping with a mysterious tan fungus. A beam of light shines through the despair when the Baudelaires meet the Quagmires, two of three orphaned triplets who are no strangers to disaster and sympathize with their predicament. When Count Olaf appears on the scene disguised as Coach Genghis (covering his monobrow with a turban and his ankle tattoo with expensive running shoes), the Quagmires resolve to come to the aid of their new friends. Sadly, this proves to be a hideous mistake.

Snicket disarms us again with his playful juxtapositionsonly he can compare bombs with strawberry shortcake (both are as dangerous to make as assumptions), muse on how babies adjust developmentally to the idea of curtains, or ponder why the Baudelaire orphans would not want to be stalks of celery despite their incessant bad luck as humans. We can't get enough of this splendid series of misadventures, and can only wager that swarms of young readers will be right next to us in line for the next installment. (Ages 9 and older) Karin Snelson

The Ersatz Elevator

Lemony Snicket

The Puzzling Puzzles: Bothersome Games Which Will Bother Some People (A Series of Unfortunate Events Activity Book)

Lemony SnicketDear Puzzle Enthusiast,

I have spent many unhappy years doing many unhappy things, and I do not recommend it. My work researching Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire and their endless troubles with Count Olaf leaves me moaning, weeping, and pulling out my hair almost every night, including weekends.

But there is no reason for you to spend your life the same way. Instead, you might choose to spend your youth distracted by mildly entertaining activities. Like school, prison, or an enormous cake with a spyglass baked into it, this collection of puzzles and games will help keep you "out of trouble," a phrase which here means "far away from distressing books and movies." In this short digest alone, I have collected such instructive diversions as a do-it-yourself blindfold, a coded message, a crossword puzzle, and a monkey fist  enough to fill up several years of your life.

I am bound to continue my research into the tragic lives of the Baudelaire orphans, but you have an opportunity to do cheerier things with your time. Take it.

With all due respect,

Lemony Snicket

A Series of Unfortunate Events: Lemony Snicket : The Unauthorized Autobiography (A Series of Unfortunate Events)

Lemony Snicket

The Tai Chi Book: Refining and Enjoying a Lifetime of Practice (Ymaa Book Series, 32.)

Robert Chuckrow Harvey I. Sober

Professional Java Security (Programmer to Programmer)

Jess Garms Daniel Somerfield Daniel SomerfieldFor any developer who needs to understand and use Java's considerable built-in support for encryption and security standards, Professional Java Securitydelivers a capable guide to both the theoretical and practical aspects of implementing security on the Java platform. With a concise presentation that moves well and covers a wide range of topics, this book fills an extremely valuable niche for any working Java programmer.

Classic titles on encryption and cryptography (such as Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C) look at security from the ground up as if developers needed to write everything themselves. The good news is that with features like the Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) and the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE), Java security is standard equipment with today's Java 2 platform. This book does a great job at giving a quick overview of the way today's encryption algorithms (including symmetric and asymmetric encryption, hash functions, and digital certificates) work, along with the way to apply them in Java. The authors anchor the theory here with practical explanation and code for using such encryption algorithms as Blowfish and RSA, plus using digital signatures and certificates and tapping SSL for secure communications over the Internet.

While books on cryptography usually describe protocols with anonymous players (with names like Alice, Bob, and the like), the authors here use more imagination, retelling a scene from Shakespeare's Hamletin which King Claudius sends a message via Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern to do away with Hamlet. No, you don't need to have read the play to understand, but this scenario and its permutations highlight in a more entertaining fashion than other titles the issues in secure communications and the ways things can go wrong.

More advanced material on securing JDBC database connections, and even on how to create custom encryption algorithms and plug them into the JCE, will let the more expert reader do more. (The authors demonstrate this latter process with sample code that implements the well-known RSA encryption algorithm.) For the busy working Java developer, coverage of the basics here will let you implement security in Java without having to reinvent the proverbial wheel. Smart, concise, and extremely useful, Professional Java Securityis a truly valuable resource for creating secure Java applications with features that every working Java developer will want to know about and use. Richard Dragan

Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity

Joel SpolskySpolsky is knowledgeable, funny and free of unnecessary religious fervor. Joel on Softwareis a must-read.

— Daniel Shefer, Slashdot contributor

...having (Joel on Software) in one place, edited, with an index, is probably the best twenty-five dollars you'll spend this year.

— Greg Wilson, Dr. Dobb's Journal

(Joel Spolsky's) genuine desire to make the software world a better place keeps us coming back for more.

— Bruce Hadley, softwareCEO.com

This book will challenge, encourage, upset, and entertain you. Spolsky knows his stuff, and he's got the war wounds to prove it. This book is worth the price of admission...

— Tom Duff, Duffbert's Random Musings

An entertaining oportunity to get to know one of today's most influential developer/authors.

— IT Conversations' producer Doug Kaye interviews Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky began his legendary web log, www.joelonsoftware.com, in March 2000, in order to offer insights for improving the world of programming. Spolsky based these observations on years of personal experience.

The result just a handful of years later? Spolsky's technical knowledge, caustic wit, and extraordinary writing skills have earned him status as a programming guru! His blog has become renowned throughout the programming world&emdash;now linked to more than six hundred websites and translated into over thirty languages.

Joel on Software covers every conceivable aspect of software programming&emdash;from the best way to write code, to the best way to design an office in which to write code! All programmers, all people who want to enhance their knowledge of programmers, and all who are trying to manage programmers will surely relate to Joel's musings.

Ideas for Great Wall Systems

Lynne Gilberg Sunset Pub Staff

The Victorian Internet

Tom StandageImagine an almost instantaneous communication system that would allow people and governments all over the world to send and receive messages about politics, war, illness, and family events. The government has tried and failed to control it, and its revolutionary nature is trumpeted loudly by its backers. The Internet? Nope, the humble telegraph fit this bill way back in the 1800s. The parallels between the now-ubiquitous Internet and the telegraph are amazing, offering insight into the ways new technologies can change the very fabric of society within a single generation. In The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage examines the history of the telegraph, beginning with a horrifically funny story of a mile-long line of monks holding a wire and getting simultaneous shocks in the interest of investigating electricity, and ending with the advent of the telephone. All the early "online" pioneers are here: Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison, and a seemingly endless parade of code-makers, entrepreneurs, and spies who helped ensure the success of this communications revolution. Fans of Longitudewill enjoy another story of the human side of dramatic technological developments, complete with personal rivalry, vicious competition, and agonizing failures. Therese Littleton

Data Structures, Algorithms, and Software Principles

Thomas A. Standish

THREE FISTED TALES OF BOB

Ivan Stang

The Book of the SubGenius : Being the Divine Wisdom, Guidance, and Prophecy of J.R. 'Bob' Dobbs, High Epopt of the Church of the SubGenius, Here Inscribed for the Salvation of Future Generations and in the Hope that Slack May Someday Reign on this Earth

J.R. Dobbs The SubGenius Foundation Rev. Ivan Stang

A Time to Grieve : Meditations for Healing After the Death of a Loved One

Carol Staudacher

Anathem

Neal StephensonAnathem, the latest invention by the New York Times bestselling author of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle, is a magnificent creation: a work of great scope, intelligence, and imagination that ushers readers into a recognizable—yet strangely inverted—world.

Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside "saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside—the Extramuros—for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.

Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fraas and suurs prepare to venture beyond the concent's gates—at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious "extras" in. During his first Apert as a fraa, Erasmas eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn't seen since he was "collected." But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change.

Powerful unforeseen forces jeopardize the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros—a threat that only an unsteady alliance of saecular and avout can oppose—as, one by one, Erasmas and his colleagues, teachers, and friends are summoned forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster. Suddenly burdened with a staggering responsibility, Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world—as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond.

The Big U

Neal Stephenson

Cryptonomicon

Neal StephensonNeal Stephenson enjoys cult status among science fiction fans and techie types thanks to Snow Crash, which so completely redefined conventional notions of the high-tech future that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if his cyberpunk classic was big, Cryptonomiconis huge... gargantuan... massive, not just in size (a hefty 918 pages including appendices) but in scope and appeal. It's the hip, readable heir to Gravity's Rainbowand the Illuminatus trilogy. And it's only the first of a proposed seriesfor more information, read our interview with Stephenson.

Cryptonomiconzooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periodsWorld War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first.... Of course, to observe is not its realdutywe already know exactly where the convoy is. Its realduty is to be observed.... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."

All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroesinimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoeteam up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties.

Cryptonomiconis vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail so precise it's exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea, or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomiconis also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and cryptoall the crypto you'll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation). Therese Littleton

The Diamond Age

NEAL STEPHENSON

In the Beginning...was the Command Line

Neal StephensonNeal Stephenson, author of the sprawling and engaging Cryptonomicon, has written a manifesto that could be spoken by a character from that brilliant book. Primarily, In the Beginning ... Was the Command Linediscusses the past and future of personal computer operating systems. "It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old," he writes, "but it is the fate of operating systems to become free." While others in the computer industry express similarly dogmatic statements, Stephenson charms the reader into his way of thinking, providing anecdotes and examples that turn the pages for you.

Stephenson is a techie, and he's writing for an audience of coders and hackers in Command Line. The idea for this essay began online, when a shortened version of it was posted on Slashdot.org. The book still holds some marks of an e-mail flame gone awry, and some tangents should have been edited to hone his formidable arguments. But unlike similar writers who also discuss technical topics, he doesn't write to exclude; readers who appreciate computing history (like Dealers of Lightningor Fire in the Valley) can easily step into this book.

Stephenson tackles many myths about industry giants in this volume, specifically Apple and Microsoft. By now, every newspaper reader has heard of Microsoft's overbearing business practices, but Stephenson cuts to the heart of new issues for the software giant with a finely sharpened steel blade. Apple fares only a little better as Stephenson (a former Mac user himself) highlights the early steps the company took to prepare for a monopoly within the computer marketand its surprise when this didn't materialize. Linux culture gets a thoroughbut fairskewering, and the strengths of BeOS are touted (although no operating system is nearly close enough to perfection in Stephenson's eyes).

As for the rest of us, who have gladly traded free will and an intellectual understanding of computers for a clutter-free, graphically pleasing interface, Stephenson has thoughts to offer as well. He fully understands the limits nonprogrammers feel in the face of technology (an example being the "blinking 12" problem when your VCR resets itself). Even so, within Command Linehe convincingly encourages us as a society to examine the metaphors of technologysimplifications that aren't really much simplerthat we greedily accept. Jennifer Buckendorff

Snow Crash

NEAL STEPHENSONFrom the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internetincarnate as the Metaverselooks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonisthacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crashinterweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crashis the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible.

Quicksilver

Neal StephensonIn Quicksilver, the first volume of the "Baroque Cycle," Neal Stephenson launches his most ambitious work to date. The novel, divided into three books, opens in 1713 with the ageless Enoch Root seeking Daniel Waterhouse on the campus of what passes for MIT in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Daniel, Enoch's message conveys, is key to resolving an explosive scientific battle of preeminence between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the development of calculus. As Daniel returns to London aboard the Minerva, readers are catapulted back half a century to recall his years at Cambridge with young Isaac. Daniel is a perfect historical witness. Privy to Robert Hooke's early drawings of microscope images and with associates among the English nobility, religious radicals, and the Royal Society, he also befriends Samuel Pepys, risks a cup of coffee, and enjoys a lecture on Belgian waffles and cleavage-—all before the year 1700.

In the second book, Stephenson introduces Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. "Half-Cocked" Jack (also know as the "King of the Vagabonds") recovers the English Eliza from a Turkish harem. Fleeing the siege of Vienna, the two journey across Europe driven by Eliza's lust for fame, fortune, and nobility. Gradually, their circle intertwines with that of Daniel in the third book of the novel.

The book courses with Stephenson's scholarship but is rarely bogged down in its historical detail. Stephenson is especially impressive in his ability to represent dialogue over the evolving worldview of seventeenth-century scientists and enliven the most abstruse explanation of theory. Though replete with science, the novel is as much about the complex struggles for political ascendancy and the workings of financial markets. Further, the novel's literary ambitions match its physical size. Stephenson narrates through epistolary chapters, fragments of plays and poems, journal entries, maps, drawings, genealogic tables, and copious contemporary epigrams. But, caught in this richness, the prose is occasionally neglected and wants editing. Further, anticipating a cycle, the book does not provide a satisfying conclusion to its 900 pages. These are minor quibbles, though. Stephenson has matched ambition to execution, and his faithful, durable readers will be both entertained and richly rewarded with a practicum in Baroque science, cypher, culture, and politics. Patrick O'Kelley

A Good Old-Fashioned Future

BRUCE STERLINGA Good Old-fashioned Futureis a paperback collection of seven short stories by former cyberpunk guru turned sociocultural prognosticator Bruce Sterling. Most of the works here come with impressive pedigrees, ranging from a Hugo Award for "Bicycle Repairman" to Hugo nominations for "Maneki Neko" and "Taklamakan." Another piece, "Big Jelly," was cowritten by Sterling's fellow cyberpunk alum, Rudy Rucker.

These stories have a lot in common. They all take place in the near future, and most are action-oriented, involving colorful characters such as secret agents, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Mafioso's, and revolutionaries. But they are also personal tales that tend to focus on individuals rather than ideas, which makes them hit home more often than standard SF fare. The best of the bunch is probably "Taklamakan," a high-concept piece about two freelance spies sent to a central Asian desert called Taklamakan, where the Asian Sphere is doing some sort of secret research into space flight. "Bicycle Repairman" is set in the same world, but instead of in an Asian desert it takes place in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the spies in this story aren't the good guys. It's a less successful piece than "Taklamakan" but also a good read.

Not all of the stories in this collection have the edgy, this-is-what-tomorrow-will-be-like quality that typifies Sterling's best work. But even when Sterling isn't at his best he's entertaining, and A Good Old-Fashioned Futureis certainly that. Craig E. Engler

Islands in the Net

Bruce SterlingSlightly dated science fiction about the near future can be fun, especially when it evokes a strange, chaotic, and dangerous world that's uncomfortably close to our present one. Bruce Sterling's 1988 book, Islands in the Net, is a thrilling blend of high tech and low humanity. The glue that binds together this world of data pirates, mercenaries, nanotechnology, weaponry, and post-millennial voodoo is the global electronic net. You'll find jarring references to pre-Microsoft Windows computer technology, the Soviet Union, and that fancy new wonder machinethe fax. But this book has enough cool stuff to keep even a jaded cyberpunk interested. The characters are far more than mere constructs used to show off the technology, and the plot is fast, complicated, and mysterious. Veteran Sterling fans will enjoy this taste of his pre-fame style.

Ian StewartIn 1884, an amiably eccentric clergyman and literary scholar named Edwin Abbott Abbott published an odd philosophical novel called Flatland, in which he explored such things as four-dimensional mathematics and gently satirized some of the orthodoxies of his time. The book went on to be a bestseller in Victorian England, and it has remained in print ever since.

With Flatterland, Ian Stewart, an amiable professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick, updates the science of Flatland, adding literally countless dimensions to Abbott's scheme of things ("Your world has not just four dimensions," one of his characters proclaims, "but five, fifty, a million, or even an infinity of them! And none of them need be time. Space of a hundred and one dimensions is just as real as a space of three dimensions"). Along his fictional path, Stewart touches on Feynman diagrams, superstring theory, time travel, quantum mechanics, and black holes, among many other topics. And, in Abbott's spirit, Stewart pokes fun at our own assumptions, including our quest for a Theory of Everything.

You can't help but be charmed by a book with characters named Superpaws, the Hawk King, the Projective Lion, and the Space Hopper and dotted with doggerel such as "You ain't nothin' but a hadron / nucleifyin' all the time" and "I can't get no / more momentum." And, best of all, you can learn a thing or two about modern mathematics while being roundly entertained. That's no small accomplishment, and one for which Stewart deserves applause. Gregory McNamee

Perfect Circle

Sean StewartWilliam "Dead" Kennedy has problems. He’s haunted by family, by dead people with unfinished business, and by those perfect pop songs that you can’t get out of your head. He’s a 32-year-old Texan still in love with his ex-wife. He just lost his job at Pet-Co for eating cat food. His air-conditioning is broken, there’s no good music on the radio, and he’s been dreaming about ghost roads.

When Will’s cousin ("My dad married your Aunt Dot’s half-sister") calls in the middle of the night about a dead girl haunting his garage, it seems like an easy way to make a thousand dollars. But nothing is ever that simple, especially when family is involved. Will’s mother is planning a family reunion of epic proportions. Will’s ex-wife is married to a former Marine. His twelve-year-old daughter Megan thinks Will needs someone to look after him. And recently his dead relatives seem to want something from him.

Cathy's Key: If Found 650-266-8202

Sean Stewart, Jordan WeismanCathy’s Book was literally a word-of-mouth success story, with over 120,000 copies of the groundbreaking, interactive teen novel in print. Perhaps less noticeable was the heart of the book: a good story well told. Now fans of Cathy Vickers will return to the exciting, unpredictable world that made the first book such a success. Cathy was your average high school student-doodling in the margins of her journal, crushing on a cute boy, and hanging out with her best friend Emma. As this story begins, she’s trying to keep a job, her journal is stolen, the cute boy is not who he seems to be, and even Emma’s side project/start-up company, Doubletalk Wireless, is about to get caught up in the mystery surrounding Cathy and her search for the truth about her father. Her presumed-dead father. It’s just a simple story really: Girl loves Boy, Boy disappears, Girl discovers secret that will alter the course of humanity....

CUCKOO'S EGG

CLIFFORD STOLL

Beginning Linux Programming (Linux Programming Series)

Neil Matthew Richard StonesProvided you have some previous basic exposure to C and Unix, Beginning Linux Programmingdelivers an excellent overview of the world of Linux development with an appealing range of essential tools and APIs.

The standout feature of Beginning Linux Programmingis its wide-ranging coverage of important topics in basic Unix programming. In a series of short chapters, the authors discuss the basics of writing Unix programs in C, with material on basic system calls, file I/O, interprocess communication (for getting programs to work together), and advanced topics such as socket programming and how to create Unix device drivers.

Parallel to this, the book introduces the toolkits and libraries for working with user interfaces, from simpler terminal mode applications to X and GTK+ for graphical user interfaces. While you won't be an authority on X or GTK+ after reading this book, you will certainly be able to explore real Linux development on your own after the capable introductory guide provided here. (The book's main example, a CD-ROM database, gets enhanced in subsequent chapters using new APIs and features as the book moves forward.) This text also serves as a valuable primer on languages and tools such as Tcl, Perl, and CGI. (There's even a section that explains the basics of the Internet and HTML.)

More than ever, there is no shortage of specific information on Linux programming, but few titles provide such a wide-ranging tour of what you need to know to get serious with Linux development. In all, Beginning Linux Programminggives the reader an intelligent sampling of essential topics in today's Linux. It's a wise choice for aspiring Unix C developers or folks seeking to extend the range of their Linux knowledge. Richard Dragan

Large and complicated digital circuits can be incorporated into hardware by using Verilog, a hardware description language (HDL). A designer aspiring to master this versatile language must first become familiar with its constructs, practice their use in real applications, and apply them in combinations in order to be successful. Design Through Verilog HDLaffords novices the opportunity to perform all of these tasks, while also offering seasoned professionals a comprehensive resource on this dynamic tool.

Describing a design using Verilog is only half the story: writing test-benches, testing a design for all its desired functions, and how identifying and removing the faults remain significant challenges. Design Through Verilog HDLaddresses each of these issues concisely and effectively. The authors discuss constructs through illustrative examples that are tested with popular simulation packages, ensuring the subject matter remains practically relevant.

Further, the authors focus on illuminating the differences between gate level, data flow, and behavioral styles of Verilog, a critical distinction for designers. The book's final chapters deal with advanced topics such as timescales, parameters and related constructs, queues, and switch level design.

Each chapter concludes with exercises that both ensure readers have mastered the present material and stimulate readers to explore avenues of their own choosing. Written and assembled in a paced, logical manner, Design Through Verilog HDLprovides professionals, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates with a one-of-a-kind resource.

Professional Linux Programming

Neil Matthew and Richard Stones Brad Clements Andrew Froggatt David J. Goodger Ivan Griffin Jeff Licquia Ronald van Loon Harish Rawat Udaya Ranawake Marius SundbakkenBy tapping the strengths of the open-source movement, developers can write custom Linux software without spending a dime on licensing fees. Aimed at the experienced C/C++ programmer, Professional Linux Programmingprovides a wide-ranging and hands-on guide to the different pieces of the puzzle that are required to program successfully on this exciting new platform.

The book is framed as a case study for building a custom database program in Linux for a video rental store. After a tour of the requirements and a brief look at project management for creating this software, the various Linux packages that are needed to implement this system are described, along with sample code, most of which is written in C. Some packages, such as the CVS version-control package, come with most distributions of Linux; others will require downloading additional software over the Internet. In every case, you're provided with the actual command-line arguments that are needed to install, configure, and run each package.

Besides a great exploration of CVS for version control, this title offers excellent coverage of the free PostgreSQL and MySQL databases, which are two very popular choices for Linux databases. The book also does a good job of explaining UI design under both the GTK+/GNOME and KDE (two popular Linux desktops), and how to extend the reach of the sample database application by using Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) and CORBA. Of course, the finished application doesn't use every Linux API that's covered here, but the book does cast a wide net, and introduces features and tools that are available.

Two prominent chapters take you on a tour of the essentials of other programming languages. There's PHP for Web development and an appealing, enthusiastic introduction to Python (which probably will turn you into a Python convert). Later chapters provide practical tips for testing and debugging applications, including how to profile your code. The book closes with a useful guide to creating Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) packages for deploying applications, as well as an overview of your options for internationalization.

By covering so many APIs, languages, and tools effectively, Professional Linux Programminggives experienced C/C++ programmers all that they need to get started with Linux development. With its remarkably clear presentation style and abundance of practical tips, the book is an admirably useful blueprint for building custom software. Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• Introduction to open-source software and Linux requirements

• Use cases and sample C objects for sample video rental store

• Version control and CVS (command-line options, revisions, branches, and multiuser version control)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas : A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

HUNTER S. THOMPSONFear and Loathing in Las Vegasis the ne plus ultra of Hunter S. Thompson and the whole gonzo clan he spawned. Written in the lurid afterglow of the 1960s, Fear and Loathingis a loosely connected series of mad dashes across the desert, trashed hotel rooms, and goofs on the brutish, naïve, or merely unhip, perpetrated by Thompson and his mammoth Samoan attorney. The pair start out high on a medicine cabinet's worth of elixirs, powders, and pills, and stay that way for 200 pages. They careen through an unsettling landscape of paranoia and alienation, but that doesn't mean the book isn't a riot. Here's a small taste: "By this time, the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. The room service waiter had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, but I was no longer seeing huge pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood."

Though somewhat dated (it appeared serially in Rolling Stonethroughout November 1971), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegasis a book of real vitality and Rabelaisian wit. A document of the counterculture after it was well past ripe and deep into rot, the book is a wild ride, a paranoid ramble that is thoroughly exhilarating and worth the trip. No pun intended.

The Lord of the Rings (Leatherette Collector's Edition)

J. R. R. Tolkien

The Fellowship of the Ring

J.R.R. TOLKIEN

THE TWO TOWERS

J.R.R. TOLKIEN

Data Structures and Program Design in C

Robert L. Kruse Bruce P. Leung Clovis L. Tondo

A Confederacy of Dunces (Evergreen Book)

John Kennedy Toole"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."

Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancusowho mistakes him for a vagrantand then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.

Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Duncesare as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatiusselfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than lifewho carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. Alix Wilber

Official Book of King's Quest: Daventry and Beyond

Donald B. Trivette

Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide

Burton Goldberg John W. Anderson Larry TrivieriThe Definitive Guideis known as the Bible of alternative medicine. You may very well want to use a dictionary stand for this hefty tome; it weighs in at more than 1,000 pages. Nearly 400 doctors (M.D.s, Ph.D.s, naturopaths, Doctors of Oriental Medicine, and osteopaths) contribute their cutting-edge knowledge, and the list of names is impressive. You'll find words of advice from Joseph Pizzorno, the president of Bastyr University in Seattle, Washington; C. Norman Shealy, the cofounder of the American Holistic Medical Association; Nobel laureate Linus Pauling; Deepak Chopra; and Joan Borysenko, author and director of the Mind-Body Health Sciences in Boulder, Colorado.

After an intriguing, optimistic look at "The Future of Medicine," the book is divided into two sections. The first profiles 43 alternative therapiesacupuncture, craniosacral therapy, qigong, hyperthermia, and yoga among themincluding their development, how they work, proven uses, and controversial or yet-to-be-proven uses, along with contact information for organizations. The second section covers 105 topics such as headaches, mental health, and allergies, along with the alternative therapies that are most likely to help alleviate pain and encourage healing. This guide is easy enough to understand to make it perfect for home reference, while it would also make a fine resource for health care providers interesting in learning more about alternative medicine. Erica Jorgensen

Bad Twin (Hyperion)

Gary TroupSometimes evil has a familiar face . . .

Paul Artisan, P.I. is a new version of an old breed  a righter of wrongs, someone driven to get to the bottom of things. Too bad his usual cases are of the boring malpractice and fraud variety. Until now.

His new gig turns on the disappearance of one of a pair of twins, adult scions of a rich but tragedy-prone family. The missing twin  a charismatic poster-boy for irresponsibility  has spent his life daring people to hate him, punishing himself endlessly for his screw-ups and misdeeds. The other twin  Artisan's client  is dutiful and resentful in equal measure, bewildered that his "other half" could have turned out so badly, and wracked by guilt at his inability to reform him. He has a more practical reason, as well, for wanting his brother found: their crazy father, in failing health and with guilty secrets of his own, will not divide the family fortune until both siblings are accounted for.

But it isn't just a fortune that's at stake here. Truth itself is up for grabs, as the detective's discoveries seem to challenge everything we think we know about identity, and human nature, and family. As Artisan journeys across the globe to track down the bad twin, he seems to have moved into a mirror-world where friends and enemies have a way of looking very much alike. The P.I. may have his long-awaited chance to put his courage and ideals to the test, but if he doesn't get to the bottom of this case soon, it could very well cost him his life.

Troup's long-awaited Bad Twinis a suspenseful novel that touches on many powerful themes, including the consequence of vengeance, the power of redemption, and where to turn when all seems lost.

Bad Twin is a work of fiction and all names, characters and incidents are used fictitiously; the author himself is a fictional character.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Lynne Truss

The Other

Thomas Tryon

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Edward R. TufteA timeless classic in how complex information should be presented graphically. The Strunk & White of visual design. Should occupy a place of honorwithin arm's reachof everyone attempting to understand or depict numerical data graphically. The design of the book is an exemplar of the principles it espouses: elegant typography and layout, and seamless integration of lucid text and perfectly chosen graphical examples. Very Highly Recommended.

Eric TysonInvesting for Dummiesis a good, all-around investment guide for the rest of us. Author Eric Tyson covers all aspects of investing, from stocks and bonds to real estate and collectibles. Tyson points readers towards investments that actually work and raises warning flags about strategies you should avoid. The book also considers whether starting and running your business can be a good investment option. If you're looking for a good place to start building a secure financial future, this is it.

Compilers

Alfred V. Aho Ravi Sethi Jeffrey D. Ullman

Around the World in Eighty Days (Tor Classics)

Jules Verne

AROUND/WORLD/EIGHTY/ (Bantam Classic)

JULES VERNE

A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Jules Verne

Paris in the Twentieth Century

JULES VERNE

SQL Queries for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL

Michael J. Hernandez John L. ViescasTo the people who are accomplished in its use, Structured Query Language (SQL) is a highly capable, eminently flexible, even beautiful way of describing the data that you want from a database, or the changes that you want to make to a database. For the rest of us, however, SQL is a first-class nuisance that we do our best to avoid by relying on relatively user-friendlybut usually less powerfultools. SQL Queries for Mere Mortals aims to bring SQL-phobes closer to the first camp by tutoring them carefully in what SQL can do.

The authors recognize that SQL queries usually come about as a result of questions from human beings, and so usefully spend a fair bit of time showing how to convert, say, "In what cities do our customers live?" into, "Select city from the customers table" and, finally, "SELECT city FROM customers" in SQL. They call this the "translation and clean up" process, and it's a fine approach. They don't press it too far, however, and are equally adept at presenting straight explanations of SQL syntax elements in prose. They spend a lot of energy graphically diagramming aspects of SQL syntax in a format that requires some up-front study. A particular reader might prefer text capsules to this arrow-intensive format, but other learners might like the graphical syntax diagrams. David Wall

Topics covered: ANSI SQL/92 for people who need to use it to make queries against business databases. The authors introduce one or two syntax elements at a timeSELECT, WHERE, JOIN, UNION, and so onand cover data extraction, data insertion, filtering, joins, calculations, and other capabilities of generic SQL.

Design Patterns

Erich Gamma Richard Helm Ralph Johnson John VlissidesDesign Patternsis a modern classic in the literature of object-oriented development, offering timeless and elegant solutions to common problems in software design. It describes patterns for managing object creation, composing objects into larger structures, and coordinating control flow between objects. The book provides numerous examples where using composition rather than inheritance can improve the reusability and flexibility of code. Note, though, that it's not a tutorial but a catalog that you can use to find an object-oriented design pattern that's appropriate for the needs of your particular applicationa selection for virtuoso programmers who appreciate (or require) consistent, well-engineered object-oriented designs.

30 Planes for the Paper Pilot

Peter Vollheim

CAT'S CRADLE

KURT VONNEGUTCat's Cradle, one of Vonnegut's most entertaining novels, is filled with scientists and G-men and even ordinary folks caught up in the game. These assorted characters chase each other around in search of the world's most important and dangerous substance, a new form of ice that freezes at room temperature. At one time, this novel could probably be found on the bookshelf of every college kid in America; it's still a fabulous read and a great place to start if you're young enough to have missed the first Vonnegut craze.

George W. Bushisms : The Slate Book of The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President

Jacob Weisberg

Cathy's Book: If Found Call 650-266-8233

Sean Stewart Jordan WeismanThis stunning debut combines reading with the world of internet gaming to create a masterful new genre that will allow teens to take the story from the page into the world of cyberspace and beyond.

Things weren't so peachy in Cathy's life before Victor broke up with her. Her father died unexpectedly, she's failing school, and her best friend is mad at her. But when Cathy decides to investigate Victor's reasons for ending their relationship, things suddenly go from bad to very, very, very bad as her findings produce more questions than answers. For instance, what does the death of Victor's co-worker, the strange mark that appeared on Cathy's arm, and the surreal behavior of several Chinese elders have to do with it?

Through Cathy's unique and irresistible voice—and lots of proof in the form of letters, photographs, date book entries, telephone numbers readers can call, websites they can access, as well as secrets only a careful reader will be able to decipher—readers will enter a strange and fascinating world where things often aren't how they appear.

Two-color illustrations plus supplemental material. Ages: 12 and up

Humans

Mike Dowdall Pat Welch

The Time Machine (Watermill Classic)

H. G. Wells

Thirty Strange Stories

H. G. Wells H.G. WellsMost people know H.G. Wells as one of the undisputed fathers of modern science fiction, but he also wrote many influential horror stories, both psychological and supernatural in content. "The Plattner Story," contained in this volume, demonstrates how Wells can move from a science-fiction premise (a venture into the Fourth Dimension) into a tale of awe and terrorin which the protagonist encounters the ghostly Watchers of the Living: "They were indeed limbless, and they had the appearance of human heads, beneath which a tadpole-like body swung.... And as he looked at the nearest of those approaching, he saw it was indeed a human head, albeit with singularly large eyes, and wearing such an expression of distress and anguish as he had never seen before upon a mortal countenance."

This volume collects the best known of Wells's horror tales, including three about unusual monsters ("The Strange Orchid,""In the Avu Observatory," and "The Sea Raiders"), grisly stories of the conte cruelvariety ("The Cone" and "The Lord of the Dynamos"), a multilayered gem about fear and the quest for knowledge ("The Apple"), and an early example of the black-magic horror tale that can be interpreted as psychological ("Pollock and the Porroh Man").

As venerable horror critic Jack Sullivan writes, "Of all the many writers of the Victorian and Edwardian periods who attempted the fashionable exercise of reconciling science with mystical experience ... Wells accomplished the fusion with the most wit and restraint. For a man who spent so many years writing essays about scientific and metaphysical subjects, he was surprisingly good at keeping his story moving and keeping essaylike explanations to a minimum.... Readers who think of Wells's short stories as being exclusively science fiction are in for some chilling surprises."Fiona Webster

INVISIBLE MAN, THE

H.G. WELLS

No-Code Plus: Novice & Technician Class Theory

Gordon West

Apple Pro Training Series: Final Cut Pro 4

Diana Weynand

The Affected Provincial's Companion, Vol. I

Lord Breaulove Swells WhimsyA far more civilized, beautiful life now lies within the grasp of your trembling fingertips

Gentle reader: do you tire of the meager offerings set forth by our humdrum age? Do you seek to cultivate blooms of refinement and joy in your life’s garden? Lord Whimsy, as befitting his office as “Affected Provincial”, humbly offers himself as a guide to those who wish to transcend the banalities of modern existence. A diverse and hilarious collection of treatises, insightful essays, philosophical diagrams, saucy poetry and other amusing trifles,The Affected Provincial's Companionwill inspire you to transform yourself into a living work of art, thus setting you upon a course towards that misty, faraway shore known to the ancients as Enchantment.

The perils of sportswear, self-defense for sissies, the proper grooming of facial hair, and how to become a bon vivant—all this and much more may be found between the shimmering covers of this sleek and utterly beguiling volume.

Want to build an electronic game, a robot, or an automated manufacturing process? All you need to get started is an ordinary PC, a simple-to-construct cable, a Basic Stamp, a nine-volt battery - and this definitive guide to developing practical solutions with the Stamp.

If you've never worked with Stamps before, you'll appreciate the fundamentals including a description of the basic electronics you'll need and a complete, task-oriented command reference for the Stamp. If you have worked with Stamps before, you'll find practical advice for PC interfacing using serial EEPROMs and other devices, analog I/O, and a host of projects that will help you realize your own designs.

This second edition covers the new advances in Stamp technology including the powerful BS2P and many more peripheral options that expand its power. In addition, it features several new projects including an RS232-controlled power supply and a bridge that lets a Stamp connected to a PC communicate via the Internet. Each chapter provides exercises to confirm your understanding of key topics. You will learn how to use the Stamp's:
· I/O commands to monitor and control digital signals to build small game projects, a cable tester, and a logic probe
· analog output capabilities to create a digitally-controlled power supply
· analog input capabilities to build a capacitance meter and a recording voltmeter
· built-in serial commands to assemble a data logger that uses EEPROM to store data and a frequency counter
· I/O interface capability to build the classic pong game for a Stamp with a limited graphics display
· robotic capabilities to drive DC motors, stepper motors, and servo motors

The CD-ROM is packed with files and information about the Stamp. It features a Basic Stamp emulator and a PIC programmer based on the Basic Stamp for times when you need the power of assembly language.

Immortal Poems of the English Language

Oscar Williams

False Logic Puzzles

Norman D. Willis

Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups

Robert A. WilsonRobert Anton Wilson is the grand pooh-bah of late-20th-century conspiracy theory, but regular Wilson fans may find Everything Is Under Controlinchoate in comparison to such masterworks as the Illuminatus! trilogy. The format may be encyclopedic, but the information isn't; to note one glaring omission, the only entries on Ronald Reagan refer readers to three other entries in which Reagan is briefly mentionednone of which has anything to do with Iran-Contra. (Actually, there is a listing for Iran-Contra, but again, it merely points to someof the pieces of the puzzle.)

The book's primary value, then, apart from the snippets of conspiracy "proof" it does provide, is in Wilson's playful yet insightful articulation of the psychology and linguistics of conspiratorial thinking. "Because we can say 'the Jews' or 'the New World Order' or 'the Patriarchy,'" he writes, "we can believe, or almost believe, that these grammatical abstractions have the same kind of reality as basketballs, barking dogs, and baked beans." There are also some fun private jokes, including a lot of data on the Discordians. It's not the best Wilson bookthat, perhaps, is Masks of the Illuminatibut it's an adequate introduction to his imaginative philosophy. Ron Hogan

Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy : "The Universe Next Door", "The Trick Top Hat", & "The Homing Pigeons"

ROBERT A. WILSON

The Illuminatus! Trilogy : The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, Leviathan

Robert Shea Robert Anton Wilson

The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid, the Golden Apple, and Leviathan

Robert Shea Robert Anton Wilson

The Most Of P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. WodehouseThe most lavish P. G. Wodehouse collection ever published. In addition to Wodehouse's best known and beloved Jeeves and Bertie stories, The Most of P. G. Wodehouse features delightful stories about The Drones Club and its affable, vacuous members: Mr. Mulliner, whose considered judgment on any and all topics is drawn from the experiences of his innumerable relatives; Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, the man of gilt-edged schemes; and Lord Emsworth, ruler of all he surveys at Blanding's Castle. Rounding out the collection are Wodehouses's witty golf stories and a complete and completely hilarious novel, Quick Service. As Jeeves would say, "The mind boggles, sir."

The Arrl Handbook for Radio Amateurs 2001 (Arrl Handbook for Radio Amateurs)

Chuck Hutchinson Joel Kleinman Dean R. Straw Larry Wolfgang

A New Kind of Science

Stephen Wolfram

HTTP Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly))

Clinton Wong

Win32 Multithreaded Programming

Aaron Cohen Mike Woodring

Battletech Operations Manual

Virtual World

Red Planet Operations Manual

Virtual World

Websters New World Thesaurus

Websters New World

Beginning GTK+ and GNOME

Peter Wright

Building Embedded Linux Systems

Karim Yaghmour

1,001 Low-Fat Vegetarian Recipes, 2nd ed.

Sue Spitler Linda R. Yoakam

University Physics

Hugh D. Young

A First Course in Differential Equations (Prindle, Weber and Schmidt Series in Mathematics)